Overview

Childhood (1990s)

The first computers I remember using were the Apple II computers in my elementary school in the early 90s. The Apple II Wikipedia page says they were first released in 1977 and discontinued in 1993, so they were already old machines when I started using them. As far as I remember, you had to load in a 5.25 inch floppy disk to do anything. There was an operating system called Apple DOS on the first computers that I used but that was nothing like a modern operating system.

The Apple IIs were the computers in the regular classrooms; our computer lab had already been upgraded to a different Macintosh model. I’m not sure which one, but I know they had color graphics and enough storage to hold multiple programs without having to load from a floppy disk. Those machines would have run one of the early versions of Macintosh Software System (term used until 1991) or Mac OS (term they started using with version 7.6 in 1991). Each student was given a 3.5 inch floppy that we kept in the computer lab. We wrote our names on them in Sharpie. We grabbed our disk when we came in, and put it back in the storage container when we left. It was where we were able to save our own files. It felt so fancy and advanced!

I know I give Apple/Mac a lot of shit nowadays, but the first computers I ever used were Apple/Mac. I have fond memories of those days because that’s when I started developing good habits with electronics & technology. We had no internet access in those early days (although we did get it at school by the time I was in 6th grade). We just had games – mostly educational games. Nowadays, a lot of my friends and colleagues comment on how fast I can type. I owe that all to being forced to play Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on those old Macs in my elementary school computer lab. We were all forced to “play” it, and almost everyone did their required drills with as little care and as many shortcuts as possible. Because once you finished your drills, you were allowed to use the rest of computer time to play whatever you wanted. But I was the nerd who actually paid attention to the fingerings it taught you and built up both accuracy and speed over time. I was consistently among the fastest typists in my class, even against the students who only typed with 1-3 fingers. I vaguely remember my speed in elementary school being between 60-90wpm, and now I can consistently do around 100, with bursts up to 120-150.

I remember how exciting our first home computer was. It was a Packard Bell desktop running Windows 95. We had dial-up internet eventually, but not at first. The computer was on a counter that had open space above it serving as a window between our living room and dining room in the house I grew up in. So, it was in a very visible, high traffic area of the house.

I also had a toy that changed my life when I was around 6-8 years old: the VTech Pre Computer Power Pad. It was the first machine I learned to program on! I learned BASIC by reading the toy’s manual and wrote my own games using it.

I think sometime around 1999/2000 my parents got a replacement computer, and the household computer was relocated to their bedroom. It had Windows 98 on it. I remember playing the hell out of Solitaire and Minesweeper on that thing for hours on end in the summer. My parents’ room was the only room in the house with the computer AND the only room in the house with air conditioning (window unit). So it was the best place in the house for me.

Teenage Years (early 2000s)

After 2000, our nuclear family blew up (pun intended). We didn’t have money to upgrade our home computer again. We had a family friend who was very into hardware, and so any upgrades we got were Frankenstein PCs from pieces that friend had lying around that they weren’t using. I remember us staying on Windows 98 for a LONG time, but honestly we probably upgraded to Windows XP at some point in the 2000s, since it came out in 2001. Or maybe I just had access to XP at school and that’s why I can remember using it. Memories unclear…

When we finally had a stable place to live (not a stable home life, to be clear, but a place to live that we weren’t in constant danger of being evicted), we actually had a dedicated computer room in that house. Our latest Frankenstein PC stayed there for years. I was in high school at this point, and was seriously into early web development (HTML and CSS). And this was at the height of Flash games. I played so many stupid little Flash games on that computer!

College Years (mid-late 2000s)

The college I attended gave all students a laptop when they moved in, replaced it with a brand new one at the end of your sophomore year, and then when you graduated you could decide to keep it (for a significantly reduced cost) or return it. You also got your own laser printer, but it was never replaced. The laptop was a pretty nice Dell (?) with Windows XP. Mine crashed during finals week of my senior year, so I returned it (and also had to scramble to redo a bunch of work that got deleted).

However, there was also a seed planted during college that wouldn’t bloom until after graduate school. During my sophomore year, I took a data structures class. The professor that taught it had a reputation for being a hardass, and for having his classes set up in a very specific, rigid way. Part of that specific, rigid way was forcing us to work in Linux. I am eternally grateful that he did not budge on this, even though SO MANY STUDENTS complained about it. He took us step-by-step through how to convert our college-provided laptops into machines that dual booted Windows and Ubuntu. (FWIW, it was almost certainly Ubuntu Dapper, version 6.06 LTS.) I learned SO MUCH from this process. And even though I abandoned Ubuntu as soon as I wasn’t taking classes from this professor anymore, it planted the seed that there is an alternative to the Windows vs Macintosh debate. That alternative was highly customizable, so that your personal computer could actually be personalized to YOUR needs and workflow. It definitely wasn’t an out-of-the-box experience at the time. There was a lot of adjustment you HAD to do, and I get why that wasn’t palatable for your average person. But your average person got so spoiled so fast! We went from not having operating systems that supported graphical interfaces in the late 1980s to point-and-click being intuitive to most people by the year 2000. It’s unfathomable to me that early Ubuntu was “too hard” for the average person in the mid-2000s, but I guess it was.

Graduate School (early-mid 2010s)

At the end of my college internship, my coworkers got me a brand new top-of-the-line laptop as a graduation gift. I am forever grateful to them for that. It was a beast of a Sony Vaio. It was almost the best specs you could get at the time. And it came with a brand new exciting operating system: Windows 7!

This was my only machine I used during graduate school, mostly because it was so good it was the only machine I needed! I did start to use mobile devices a little more during this time (I think I’ll add a separate section at the end to talk about mobile operating systems, because they are so different), but my Windows 7 Sony Vaio laptop got me from day 1 through writing and presenting my dissertation and writing and submitting job applications.

Early Professional Career (mid-late 2010s)

In my first job after graduate school, I was teaching both math and computer science. For simple introductory programming in Python, it was easy enough to teach students who were using Windows or mac. But in preparing to teach the more advanced topics, I came to the same conclusion some of my colleagues did, which was the same conclusion my own data structures professor arrived at: you gotta use Linux. I eased back into it with a dual boot, but by 2017 I was 100% Linux and I haven’t looked back or doubted it since.

I dipped my toes back in by dual booting Fedora Linux with Windows 7. But then I got curious about what Ubuntu was like after several years away from it, so I played with that too. Then I found out about desktop environments, so I wanted to try all kinds of distro+DE combinations.

Over a few years at this point in my career, I got really good at writing 4 sets of instructions for everything: how to do it in Windows 7, how to do it on a mac, and how to do it in a Debian/Ubuntu based Linux environment, and how to do it in a Fedora Linux environment. Sometimes, to keep it simple, I would set up Linux Mint virtual machines for my students so everyone could be working from the same environment. But even in that case, I would have to write instructions about how to use a virtual machine from different environments.

In 2016, I bought my own server, a Dell with Ubuntu Server on it. To this day, it runs Ubuntu Server LTS.

In 2017, I ordered my first System76 laptop, a Galago Pro. In 2019, I ordered an Oryx Pro to replace it, but it was too big and heavy for me to easily transport around campus with me. So, I ended up returning the Oryx Pro almost immediately and getting a Darter Pro instead.

As a System76 observer and eventual customer, I found out about Pop!_OS when it was still in beta (or maybe even alpha?). I started using it when it was officially released in late 2017 and it has been my primary distro ever since.

In February 2018, I did my first desktop build from scratch since I was a kid. I think it started with a Windows 7 + Fedora Linux dual boot, but as of this writing it has Windows 11 + Pop!_OS.

Recent (early-mid 2020s)

When my System76 Darter Pro laptop was starting to feel sluggish in 2021 and needed to be replaced, I did very much want another System76 machine. But the way my teaching evolved, I needed to be able to draw digital diagrams using a stylus+tablet and connect that to a projector. Early in my career, when my maximum class size was 24, I could draw diagrams on the board and every student could easily see them. But when I moved to a larger institution with typical undergraduate class sizes of ~75 students, I needed to be able to use technology instead of chalk to ensure all students could see what I was trying to show them. In addition to these local environmental changes for me, COVID-19 changed classrooms everywhere. I needed to either have a drawing tablet peripheral that I hooked up to my laptop while teaching (clumsy and bulky) or have a touchscreen laptop that I could draw on directly (less common, but a sleeker solution).

System76 didn’t offer any touchscreen laptops, so I ended up buying an Asus ZenBook touchscreen laptop that came with Windows 10. I immediately set up a Pop!_OS dual boot. I replaced it in 2023 with a Lenovo laptop that came with Windows 11. Again, I immediately set up a Pop!_OS dual boot. As of this writing, System76 still doesn’t offer any touchscreen laptops.

Mobile Operating Systems

My first smartphone was a Blackberry Bold I got in ~2008, which ran Blackberry 5.

I continued with Blackberry devices up until they stopped putting full physical QWERTY keyboards on them. Then I transitioned to Android devices.

I had a Chromebook at some point in graduate school, but it wasn’t very useful.

Some of my early Android devices were

• Google Nexus 7 tablet (2012)
• Sony Xperia Z1/Z2/Z3 phone – don’t remember which one, but it came out in 2014
• Sony Xperia Z3 compact tablet (2015)
• Huawei P10 Plus (2018)

In 2016, I got the original Google Pixel phone and I was hyped for a vanilla Android experience. I got the Pixel 2 in 2018. But then that phone BRICKED ITSELF while trying to install an Android update. So I got the Huawei P10 Plus as a “fuck you.” That was a good phone, but the media coverage at the time was all about how Huawei was an evil Chinese company spying on Americans. So I did go back to the Pixel line after that and got a Pixel 4A phone (2020), a Pixel Slate tablet (2020), and a Pixel 6A (2022). I went with the A line phones because they were less expensive, they kept the headphone aux jack longer than the higher end line, and I couldn’t really trust Google not to fuck me over so I didn’t want to splurge on their best phones.

I recently got a Pixel 8 Pro – the first top of the line phone I’ve gotten since the Pixel 2 back in 2018. But I am not very happy with it (physically too big, no noticeable improvements from my 6A that still works). I tried to return it, but the Google Store apparently has a 15 day return policy and I contacted them on – literally! I am not exaggerating! – day 16.

So, to summarize and map all of those devices onto operating systems, I’ve used:

• Blackberry 5
• ChromeOS
• Android, starting with 4.1 Jelly Bean through the current version (Android 14), and every version in between