Flash waaaaay back to the late 1970s, when this pilot fish has just acquired his first desktop computer: a mammoth, three-cubic-foot monster with a retail price that just about matches a new VW Beetle."It had two 8-inch floppy disk drives and three different CPUs, so it would run any operating system then extant," says fish.

"I connected it to a terminal and set it to work in my spooky old writing/art-photography studio, where its sole function was word processing scripts and poetry, printing out to a fancy NEC daisy-wheel printer that was connected by a parallel cable nearly as wide as my hand."