Oh, yeah. I had to have one.

From the moment I first touched a keyboard, I knew I was born to own a computer. OWN. A. COM.PU.TER. My computer. After a lifetime of science fiction, I was mentally prepared for the day I would call a computer "Sol III Primary Governing Unit" but never imagined I would ever call one "mine."

Lordy, I was ignorant. I knew nothing whatever about them. The only computer I'd ever rubbed noses with cost about five times my annual salary and bristled with custom-soldered hardware. I had no idea how utterly sad and stupid anything I could afford was going to be. Which was okay, because I never realized how sad and stupid my first computer was until many years later.

Buying a computer was a terrifying prospect in those days; every little component cost hundreds or thousands, and everything about them was proprietary. There were still a good half-dozen players in the home market, any one of which could go belly up at any moment, sticking you with a putty-colored doorstop.

Since we had IBM's at work, I decided IBM was the only choice — so I could justify the expense as a professional one, you see. (Though I did briefly consider the very clever Atari ST, which was actually capable of drawing circles. Round ones!). It would ultimately turn out to be a wise decision, but in the short term it was pointless. The IBM machines at work at that time ran a non-DOS, proprietary operating system (operating system? DOS? Whatever!).

I couldn't afford an actual IBM, of course. Well, I could've swung the new PCjr at $700, but I didn't like the look of it. Charlie Chaplin was its spokesman, for chrissakes. The next one up, the XT, was getting on for $5,000. I'm not sure my car was worth 5K in 1985.

That left an IBM clone. In them thar days, the world of clones was Dodge City. With Matt Dillon out of town and Festus in charge. And Doc dipping the laudanum and Miss Kitty...oh, you get the analogy. There were just beginning to be some pretty decently compatible compatibles. There were some very dubiously compatible machines. There were boxes of both kinds being cobbled together in basements and garages, and others by small resellers that would one day grow into big companies. There were out-and-out money-stealing rip-off shops. I didn't know anybody else who had bought a computer. What to do?

I fell back on my professional training...art! I bought a copy of Computer Shopper — still around today, and still as thick as a Manhattan phone book. But in those days, most of the ads were produced on typewriters. I mean typewriters. Clickity-clickity. The HP Laserjet had only just been invented, after all. Cheezy, low-budget, stuck together with Scotch tape, cut-up-with-an-Xacto and Xeroxed, most of the ads gave off a whiff of basement. I went through the magazine page by page, for the whole thousand pages, and I marked all the pages that were professionally typset.

I had hardly put a dent in my loan payments before I began tinkering with the hardware. The biggest jump was the first one, from the 8086 processor to the 80286, as they were not in their essence very compatible. The peripheral cards weren't even the same size, so my original case wouldn't close on my new additions. I covered the machine with a black plastic bag for a year. I loved that; a kick-ass machine in a trash bag. Geek humor came as naturally as squirting milk out my nose.

I have since bought one example of every new generation of motherboard except, I think, the 486SX (the deliberately crippled 486, wasn't that the SX?). I've had seven or eight cases. Ten keyboards. A dozen mice. Countless hard drives. Four monitors (I've had good luck with monitors). I've lost count of the HD controller cards and video cards and sound cards and modem cards and network cards and printers and scanners and all the extra crap machines needed to do anything at all interesting. Though I could count them if I wanted; they're all over there in the Chifforobe.

And every new machine was built with at least one component from the original XT until, finally, it was down to that peculiar 5¼" 1.6 meg floppy drive. When the day came that there was no use for a 5¼" drive, it retired and my first computer was officially no more. The empty shell is sitting six feet behind me as I type, peering over my left shoulder, with a large ceramic bowl of mixed nuts on its head. I won't throw it away.

Oh, yes. It knows I still love it.