Reflecting on the books recommended by Paul, such as "Commodore:

A Company on the Edge" by Brian Bagnall, "TOO BLUE!: The IBM PC from an Acorn to a Renegade" by Dennis Andrews, and "Almost Perfect" by W.E. Pete Peterson, I began to ponder my own history with PC hardware and software purchases. Many of these choices, unfortunately, did not stand the test of time.

My journey began with a Commodore Vic-20, purchased for around $90 at a K-Mart in the summer of 1993. At the time, a Commodore 64 was available for about $100 more, but financial constraints made that option unattainable. The Vic-20 served me for about a year, after which it became more of a relic than a tool for learning.

In the mid-1980s, my parents bought an IBM XT clone. I learned to use a word processing program my mother acquired from a college class. Despite its clunky interface, it helped me through high school and part of college, while my peers were still using typewriters.

By 1989, we upgraded to a 386SX machine with 2MB of RAM. The absence of a math co-processor proved to be a limitation in the following years. One of my more successful software purchases was Windows 3.0, along with Aldus PageMaker 4.0, which I used extensively. I also invested in Aldus FreeHand and PhotoStyler, thanks to discounts offered due to my PageMaker license.

In 1993, I bought my own computer, a 486 DX 50MHz, believing it to be the fastest processor available. However, I soon realized that my research was lacking, as doubler chips for 33MHz processors were already on the market. Despite this, the machine lasted five years with various upgrades.

I took advantage of student discounts to purchase WordPerfect for Windows 6 and Borland’s Quatro Pro, unaware of Microsoft's suite of products. My first professional job in digital prepress introduced me to Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator, which I continued to upgrade at discounted rates.

I also invested in a Bernoulli drive, which had a larger capacity than Syquest drives but was short-lived. I later switched to Zip drives, which had a longer lifespan. By 1998, Microsoft and Adobe had solidified their dominance, making future purchases more straightforward.

Despite some short-sighted technology purchases, driven by financial constraints, I continued to navigate the evolving tech landscape. For instance, I chose a SANdisk MP3 player over an iPod and bought MP3s from Walmart, which became non-functional when DRM support was discontinued.

Technology will undoubtedly continue to present us with choices akin to the Betamax/VHS dilemma, and I will likely continue to make some wrong ones.