eWEEK Labs Staffers Reveal – ‘The Products That Turned Me On To Technology’

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A

My parents got me this home computer when I was teenager. It let me write programs in Basic and save them to a cassette recorder. It also came with some pretty cool games.

Moral Decay (MUDs)

Before World of Warcraft or Diablo II, there were MUDs, or multi-user dungeon games. My personal favorite–Moral Decay–was an embarrassing addiction. But I leaned more from that game about modem communications, telnet, gopher, m

Oregon Trail

In grade school, I loved the game Oregon Trail so much that my parents enrolled me in computer classes so that I could learn to code my own version. My game was a MUD cleverly–or so I thought at the time–called California Trail. Back

Sinclair ZX80

The Sinclair ZX80 was the first computer I bought. Between that and a Radio Shack TRS-80, I was in technology hog heaven. The first IT app I got excited about was an early wireless bridge called Intersect. Taking the wire out of netw

VCR

The VCR was one of the first technology products I remember making a marked improvement on my quality of life. My parents insisted on sending me to Chinese language school, scheduled at the worst possible time–Saturday morning–in direct

Wasteland I spent hours devising ways to subvert the save-game function of Wasteland–a role-playing game set in some post-apocalyptic future–to stock up on cash, weaponry and gear. The, uh, workaround took advantage of the 5.25-inch disk-swapp

MultiMate

Im dating myself, but one of the gifts I got when I graduated from high school was an electric typewriter. Three years into college, however, I was introduced to the PC and MultiMate. I sort of railed against the machine at first, b