memory – Jeff Thompson

While working on a piece, I made a list of every computer I’ve owned or used regularly. I thought that we be 5-6, but the list kept growing and is not at 18.

YEAR	MAKE/MODEL	NOTES
1988-96	Apple IIGS	Used in elementary and middle school, mostly to play Number Munchers and Oregon Trail
1994-96	486 of some kind	Used at home for DOS games (didn't really know how to do anything else)
1996-98	Compaq Presario 5140	Used at home, used for games, going on AOL, graphics programs - all with that distinctive power/sleep button
1998-2000	Some kind of eMachines desktop	Used at home for games, going on the real internet, using a cracked version of Corel Draw that Steve gave me, building webistes using hand-written HTML and launching on Tripod
2000-2004	Apple Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White)	Used at college (I'm pretty sure this is the kind we had), used mostly for Photoshop, Illustrator, and writing papers
2002-2004	Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop	Used while in college (passed down from my dad's office), recorded some crappy little songs using the built-in sound recording app and a plastic mic
2004-2006	Gateway laptop (still unidentified)	Also used in late college and in early grad school, used for recording music on a cracked version of Cakewalk, making art using cracked versions of all kinds of software
2006-2009	Mac PowerBook 12" laptop	Used during grad school and after for EVERYTHING, mostly on cracked software, too :)
2009-11	iPhone 3GS	My first smartphone, bought after I lost the charger to my crappy cellphone, played lots of Scrabble on this
2009-13	MacBook Pro 15" (2x)	Used at first teaching job with NO cracked software! (2 different computers of the same model)
2011-13	iPhone 4	Replaced my previous smartphone, donated the old one to Angeles, played lots of Angry Birds on this
2012-present	Raspberry Pi Model B	Bought very early on, now runs all my bots
2013-prese	Nexus 10 tablet	Bought using a grant, mostly to run Processing sketches
2013-present	MacBook Pro 15" w Retina Display	Current workhorse
2014-present	Mac Mini	Also bought using a grant, mostly for installations (and formerly for and running bots)
2014-present	iPhone 5s	Current smartphone, mostly use for email and directions/maps

* A note: by computer I mean anything that can do significant processing, like a smartphone, not anything that does computation or runs programs. I’m also excluding computers that I’ve used but don’t work here, like supercomputers :)