How many computers have you had?

Six. That's how many computers I've had.

My first one was a loaner from a friend. It had no hard drive, let alone a modem. There was no internet yet to connect to, and the BBS world was a shadowy place where girls like me didn't go, but even so, inside that box, behind that screen, was this whole amazing world of potential: I wrote my first novel on that computer. It was 1989.

The modem came with a Windows 3 desktop that my dad bought in a fit of early adopterhood then gave to me in a subsequent fit of technophobia. I spent a lot of my time on Prodigy, and then on the real internet, and I thought, as I have thought almost every day since, "This! This is why I was born in the late 20th century!"

I built my next one--fried the first motherboard instantly, but eventually got it working. I wrote my first HTML on it and designed my first web pages. It served me for at least three years before spam, viruses and Windows 98 SE operating system obsolescence finally converged to kill it.

That was when I made the leap, all at once, to cable broadband, wireless, a laptop, and a cellular phone. I bought a factory-refurbished Dell Inspiron running Windows XP, a nine-pound behemoth whose screen brightness and clarity I have yet to better (though if FedEx ever gets here, I think I'm about to).

A refurbished Gateway convertible running Windows XP Tablet Edition that I got cheap on uBid (thank you and rest in peace, rosheen) as a travel computer, was pressed into main-computer duty when the Dell hard drive failed. Gateway Tablet served me pretty faithfully until Mr Burglar relieved me of it last week.

I'm bridging the gap with this little Samsung french-fry computer--again, bought for travel purposes. It is, I just realized, the first brand-new, ready-out-of-the-box computer I've ever owned.

Any minute now (tapping foot impatiently), FedEx is gonna bring me the second one, Computer Number Seven, a Dell Studio running Vista. With a BluRay drive! And 8GB of RAM.

Any minute now...