!C for Computers --- agk's phlog 11 June 2021 @ 1902 --- written on Pinebook Pro with intermittent power due to thunderstorm after the bank closed before I got there --- I think the first computers I saw were an Apple Macintosh Plus and an IBM PC with monochrome amber display running DOS in my elementary school library. I searched the card catalog for books and played Oregon Trail. My dad's a preacher. A woman in the church invited me to use what I guess was the Mosaic browser to look at the web around the time of Yeltsin's coup. My dad typed his sermons on a typewriter. I typed school papers on it. That's why I hit keys hard. I never learned to touch-type, but can bang out a good typescript on the overused ribbon in a manual Underwood. My dad got a laptop with WordPerfect for DOS to write sermons near the end of the Bosnian War. It had a reflect- ive monochrome display, parallel port, and 3.5" floppy drive. Maybe an early Toshiba Sattelite? He eventually let me write school papers with it (and print them on a Brother dot-matrix printer). I played Operation Neptune. I bet it still boots and runs. Around 1996 I got my own typewriter. Dad got a desktop. I made an Angelfire website and played Myst. I made 'zines by cutting and pasting camera-ready art and typewritten pages. I had them offset printed and helped the print shop with folding and saddle-stitching them and other jobs to get a discount. In 2001 I had an Apple iBook for a year. I used Pine to read and write lots of emails related to protest organizing and did poorly in school. After that I didn't have a compu- ter for a decade. I used computer labs for email. In 2010 I used my boyfriend's circa 2003 laptop and two large file cabinets to keep research notes, write a book about verna- cular medicine in central Mississippi, and write my first resume. I got my first mobile in 2005 from a friend who wanted to support my low-resource medicine and disaster response work. It was a flip phone. She put me on her family plan. Til then I checked a shared voicemail from payphones. In 2010 my then-sugardaddy bought me a BlackBerry Bold. It made keeping up with email and writing long SMS texts easier. It was useful in Haiti after the quake. BBMs got through when calls and SMS failed. I got a Toshiba nb205 netbook with Windows XP around 2011. When it failed to boot got I got an NB305. Since I couldn't do anything useful with Windows 7 Starter Edition, I installed CrunchBang, an openbox-based Debian derivative. I spent a lot of time in forums and checking reference books. I eventually replaced openbox with i3wm, a tiling window manager. I broke its cooling fan when I threw it out a 3rd floor window in 2013. Otherwise it still works. Today I use: * Nokia 2610 mobile mfg 2006 -- GSM calling and SMS, * OnePlus2 mobile (AOSP) -- VOIP calling, XMPP chat, music/podcast listening, reading blogs, * ThinkPad X61 mfg 2007 running Debian/i3 -- laptop, * Pinebook Pro running Manjaro/i3 -- school laptop. * ARPA account on SDF's public access Unix server running NetBSD -- social computing. My machines don't like Zoom videoconferencing. The Nokia has to be replaced soon because 2G carrier equipment is being retired. I don't particularly like computers, but these are the ones I've known.