When I started college I had no money. But my mom's company was getting rid of all their old computer equipment, so I found myself with a bright, shiny, new...okay, it was none of those things. It was a 1990 Toshiba laptop. Yeah, just think about that. When this computer was made, the Soviet Union still existed. I was probably not even in elementary school yet. It was ancient. I had no idea they even made laptops back then.
Anyway, the laptop was that grayish-beige color that computers all used to be, and it actually wasn't very big at all. Maybe 14 or 15 inches? It was very square and had no internal memory whatsoever. You had to use the external disk drive (which was revolutionary in that it took 3.5-inch disks) to even get it to work. But again, I was young and poor, so I was totally cool using it.
Here's where the real problem came in. Seriously, it worked okay, and I could have probably made it through college with that and the computer lab, but there was one major flaw that popped up before I could even type one paper on it:
Instead of typing a it typed ax. Every time. No idea why. It didn't do it with any other letters, and if I backspaced, it deleted both the A and the X. Unfortunately, A is a letter I happen to use with relative frequency. I literally could not get past the first letter of my name before I was stuck.
So I spent a lot of time at the computer lab throughout college. And when my sisters went to school, they both got real laptops. And eventually so did I. And now I've blown up two laptops and a desktop computer, so in hindsight, that thing probably didn't stand a chance.
Oh, and the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore either. Isn't evolution great?
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