In 1982 I was still desperately trying to graduate (escape) from UCSD. I was living with my dad in a 2-bedroom apartment in El Cajon, California. My work station, shown below, was jammed into one corner of my bedroom. Just outside the window was the I-8/Highway 67 interchange, which was very, very noisy.

1. My Work Station. Yes, it was merely two half-high file cabinets with a piece of particle board straddled between them. 2. My First Computer, "Tom." I purchased this system in June of 1982. It's a TRS-80, also known as a "Trash-80," though I never minded that slur because the computer wasn't the best system, nor the first I wanted, but it was the easiest one to buy. (I originally wanted an Apple II, but the jerk in the Apple store was so rude I went across the street to Radio Shack.) The details: 32K (yes, that's kilobytes) of RAM, one 180K 5 1/2-inch floppy disk drive, built-in monitor and keyboard. No graphics, only text. My mom bought me a 300bps modem for my birthday (it can't be seen in the photo, but it's sitting behind the folders). This system cost me $1048. At this time this picture was taken, I had paid an additional $800 for a 16K RAM upgrade and the first floppy drive. I bought a third-party RS-232 port, which I needed for the modem. Buying and installing third party stuff for your Trash-80 was expressly forbidden by the idiots at Radio Shack, though everyone did it. I used SuperScripsit as my word processor and the stupid Radio Shack communications program, which I forget the name. I programmed in BASIC and Z80 assembler, writing several games and many communications programs. I was on this computer that I wrote my first computer magazine article. You'll notice that there's a dust cover on the computer. Back in those days, there was no point in leaving the system on all the time. In fact, I didn't start doing that until 1991 or so, when Microsoft made it take longer and longer for a computer to start. 3. My First Digital Image. This image was taken at the Del Mar Fair in the summer of 1979. They used an Apple II computer and a video camera, and the result was printed on a standard text printer. I don't know what happened to this image. I was probably lost during one of my moves. 4. Programming manuals. Most of the time I would program. Shown are BASIC language manuals, one of which dealt with programming for the floppy disk, which was new to me. The other manual tells how to use the TRS-80 Assembly language program, which I was getting into at this time. (My first computer book, never published, was about Z80 programming.) 5. A Typewriter!? I didn't buy a printer until mid-1983 or so. It cost me $700 for a tiny, dot matrix printer. (And then I went nuts; I probably wrote 60 short stories in that time, none of which was ever published, though I did submit a few of them to magazines.) (No, actually one was published. Andy Rathbone was editing a magazine at the time and he published my first fiction piece. Wow. That was a long time ago.) I bought the typewriter from Sears before I bought the computer from Radio Shack. I still have the typewriter, though I don't think I've taken it out of its case since 1990 or so. I remember hating to have to write my college papers on the typewriter when the computer was so handy. But $600 was hard to come by for a printer back then. 6. Kazoo. Yes, I'm a kazookeeper. Also, I'm noting how clean my desk was. I must have been crazy!