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In the 5-th grade 1980 (Budapest) had a fascinating to me and all my admiring classmates digital wrist watch that would light up a red LED light emitting diode display when pushing a button to see what time it was, it was able to show 24h mode, date, time and seconds... just before this an automatic wind up mechanical wrist watch was the coolest piece of technology I owned... My dad had a Texas Instruments 30 scientific calculator that I was admiring...

After moving to the states I had a pocket calculator and calculator wristwatch in the 7-th grade skipping the 6-th grade entirely and joining in the 7th grade in feb 1982 at Paradise Ca...

Second half of 8-th grade was in Glendale CA and later City of Industry/La-Puente CA I had an inexpensive walkman AM/FM cassette player but later I had a real Sony Dolby auto reverse AM/FM cassette player of much higher quality and a scientific calculator wrist watch...


9-th grade to end of 10-th grade was in Pomona CA, and there a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer was available in electronics class where we learned tons of information about DC/AC circuits, resistors, capacitors, coils, transistors, CMOS, integrated circuits, soldering, etching, circuit boards, designs, breadboards, four semesters of electronics and earned A- to B every semester... at home during this time I had Texas Instruments 99-4A personal computer on which I would type BASIC programing language games into from magazines then later save the programs and store them on regular audio cassettes... at home also had nice Sound-Design bookshelf AM/FM stereo, plus double cassette AM/FM portable boom-box stereo and very successful CB radio base station with Starduster antenna, RG8, on 40-50ft antenna pole on top of already tall apartment complex operating mostly on CH-14 AM, D-104 microphone, easily making long distance contacts under proper ionospheric conditions even without Palomar 300w HF tube amp... Also Atari 5200 was loads of fun! 1984-1985 ON-TV home made descrambler electronic project was simply about switching left-right picture component/frame back to normal then RF 75-ohm TV out to CH 3-4...



11-th trough end of 12-th grade in Paradise CA, I am mostly into (riding/rebuilding) fast motorcycles and four semesters of awsome wood and metal shop clases, but on the side I still had a 400ch Radio Shack scanner covering 25-1300MHz AM/FM/WFM searching in 5,10,12.5,30,50 KHz steps including 800 MHz bands (cellular-hack) and CB radio base station with RG8 +antennae on top of tallest (~115ft) pine tree mostly using (CH38) 27.385MHz LSB (no-amp)...



In 1989 while at McClellan AFB I purchased mail order and sent back almost immediately from Paradise-CA an Apple II (clone-???) with monochrome monitor for about $800 from QVC television shopping network and went out upon returning to North Highlands (CA), from Amiga store on Watt Ave. (just outside the base) a Commodore Amiga-500 with 1084 color monitor and 512 Kb RAM extension and external 3.5 in double density floppy disk drive for about $1150, later added 24pin dot matrix printer for another $360... The A500 photo with 24pin printer was taken at RAF Greenham Common UK in 1990, by 1992 just before the Amiga-3000 purchase the same A500 had a 2.5in 20MB internal HD, 2400 baud modem, 8 MB RAM, double external DD 3.5in disk drives and was using an external 14.4K Supra FAX modem to dial-up to bulletin boards since 1991 (Castle_AFB) and before TCP/IP networking came to the Amiga...





In 1992 while attending Butte College and later at CSU-Chico I had the Amiga-3000 with the 1GB internal HD (paid $1040 just for HD in 1992), 256mb SCSI tape drive backup, external CD-ROM, HP desk-jet printer, was running Virtual Palace BBS until it all got boring, also had IBM 386dx emulator daughterboard running MSDOS 5.0 in the Amiga 3000 was simultaneously also able to run Macintosh emulation (CSUC digital logic design class projects) and later the A3000 got a 68040 CPU upgrade... Since mid 1990s I still have my TI85 calculator with modified "extra-speed" hack (capacitor)... The next computer purchase just as I was graduating from CSU-Chico with Computer Science degree in 1997 was a Microsoft NT4.0 workstation on Intel Pentium CPU, then a series of similar Intel hardware desktop computers always cheap insecure Microsoft NT4.0, while at CSU Chico I worked as technician and later I System Adminitered at IBM but I seriusly discount both experiences as "government-sponsored-setups" and understanding what I went trough this time period requires familiarity with events simultaneously occuring to me later still were nearly seven years long 1998-2004 motorhome living full time, in 2000 spring I passed Amateur Radio FCC exam with nearly 100% scores on two tests back to back same day (Novice/Technician) I missed 1 question on each...

<<--- click motorhome picture to see electronics inside <<---

Later in 2005 while in Hungary I got my first laptop ever, a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo-L7300 running Win2K 1.6 Ghz +160GB HD +WiFi nicely configured when sold used for $100 in Chico CA, to purchase in 2010 my current Acer 64bit Win7 laptop, now nicely configured with 512GB HD, 4GB RAM, WiFi...






The last computer purchase (Acer-laptop) was best at $299 before I added dual core CPU and 1/2TB HD, (overclocked to 1950 MHz, and 2GHz overclock)

the MyTouch 3G T-Mobile/Google is a LINUX handheld pocket computer that needs rooting and firewalling but otherwise nice and usefull technology that happens to be a phone as well... android remain usefull after T-Mobile service turns "off" it is possibly more "secure" due to discontinuation of "inband" spying/controll from Government/PhoneCompany...


In October 2011 I purchased the Flyer tablet computer and I think these thin clients are the de-facto future of computing with back end servers holding your data that you interact with using SSL secured networks...


By my recent count I currently have five usefull computing devices in my small one room studio/home... Funny thing is that these newer items were much cheaper and far more superior than most of the early computing devices I payed huege sums of money for, the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo-L7300 was about $800 in 2005 before upgrades, the Amiga-3000 was about $1350 in 1992 and I paid $1040 just for the SCSI 1Gb internal 3.5in HardDrive plus $200-$300 more for each of the (14.4K - 56K-baud) SupraFaxModems, in 1989 I paid about $1150 for the Amiga-500 that came with a Comodore 1084 color monitor and internal and external DD 3.5in floppy disk drives, another $360 for 24-pin dot-matrix printer, about $380 for A570 SCSI external tape backup device, about $250 for HP DeskJet printer in 1990s... The TI 99-4a was on sale for $99 when we bought it in 1983 and it used audio tape to "backup" BASIC programs you typed in from magazines... that is alot of money over the years... NT40 boxes 1997-2005 were relatively cheap and they don't even count...

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