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My computer life is remarkably tame and uninteresting compared to many of yours. Brought up with a BBC/B complete with tape deck (and an older brother who established that you could vary the speed of his tape-to-tape by upto about +18% and the Beeb would still load the programme nicely), hooked up to a TV for all its colourful glory. No expansions, not additional CPU boards. Just a plain ol' BBC/B. I do fondly remember Chuckie Egg, but I was always more into Repton. Some years later my older brother bought himself a 386 SX 25 (with "Turbo" button to slow it down to 16MHz for some older applications). I forget the size of the harddrive, but it wasn't terribly big. Later upgraded with SBPro card and CDRom drive and some additional RAM. Never really got my head around EMS and XMS either. Ran various incarnations of MS DOS. Acquired a P-166 in about '96 or '97. Used mainly to play Grand Theft Auto (before they went and ruined it by making it all 3D and rubbishy). Acquired a PII-333 in '98 or '99. These, as expected, were Windows machines - I think I managed to avoid Windows 98. Around this time I started my venture into Linux. 2000ish and I built myself an AMD Athlon 1.4GHz. I was getting into OSes at this point, and I think the most I had on there at one was 2 incarnations of Mandrake Linux (9.1 was my main workhorse, the other was just to see whether it was worth updating); Slackware; some "Debian for the Desktop" style distro that has since disappeared; SuSE; my own LFS system; AROS (which I had managed to install to a partition); FreeBSD; Darwin x86 and Windows 2000... or at least I thought I had the last 2. Turns out that I had accidentally over-written the Windows 2000 partition whilst installing the Darwin system - at that time I really couldn't get my head around the Darwin partition naming convention, and the partition I chose (which I thought was an unused "data" partition) turned out to be my Windows install. I didn't find out that I had accidentally obliterated my Windows install for about 3 months... it was then that I realised that I really didn't need it, so I didn't look back. When I eventually got Debian proper to work, apart from a brief stint with Ubuntu (to make life easier dealing with my nVidia card), I stuck with it. I'm now on several, newer machines, but all running Debian or Ubuntu. So, not really very varied. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq