I was very resistant to computers. The first I worked on was in 1988, I think, when I rewrote someone's script. There were macros for everything, I lost an entire day's work when the system crashed, it printed out on those awful papers with the sides you had to tear off, and the font, the only one there was, I think, was horrible. So, it was years until I tried again. I had my trusty IBM Selectric, which I loved. Then I got a typewriter/word processor, but it seemed stupid, so I continued with my Selectric. Then around 1998 I got a Compaq Presario at Varese and that enabled me to get on the Internet at work - slowly. I think it was in 1997, though, that I was given Web TV, and that was my Internet for years. I never had a home computer until 2000, when I got a Toshiba laptop, which I still have in the garage and which still boots up. I found some fascinating documents on it two years ago. Those were the wacky days when you saved everything to floppy discs - I still have all of those, plus for the bigger saves I had an external zip drive, which I still have along with THOSE discs.
In 2001 I got a Dell laptop, and that I had until I switched to Apple. Too many problems with the Dell, horrible tech support in India, but I wrote my first three books on that Dell, or two anyway. Then, when the Dell hard drive crashed and I lost everything on that computer (most of which was backed up on floppies or zips) I literally put the thing on the floor and stomped it into pieces. Then I remember vividly canvassing our dear readers at the time whether I should make the switch to a Mac laptop. The consensus was yes, and I bought the Mac Powerbook and it was a world-changer. Suddenly everything was easy as pie - and I had Word for Mac. I did have a hard-drive problem a year in, but I had Apple Care and they gave me a new hard drive and there were no problems after that. Plus, I had an external backup drive by that time and everything saved to that.
