This morning I commuted next to someone who was doing monstrous and wonderful things with her iPhone, including what looked like advanced cryptography. I thought about Fassbender, who is faster and smarter than my home laptop, and how the iPhone probably leaves them both in the dust.

I bought my first laptop in college, from the boyfriend of a friend. It had an 8GB hard drive, and maybe 128MB of RAM. I MARVELED. How could I ever learn to handle such a fine-quality, state-of-the-art machine? “Quickly, upload WinAmp from my external Iomega Zip drive and load up Jeff Buckley! I have poetry to write.”

(Look, I know so little about computers that I was probably getting suckered in on this thing even back in the day. However, in my defense, I was raised Luddite by accident. My family only got Windows after my junior year in high school, and I had no internet at home, ever. I bought an “ethernet cable” my first day at college only because the school made you sign on with a student account for some registration hoopla. I never left my room again. Part of me will be in that room forever, falling out over the internet. “YOU CAN LOOK UP WHATEVER YOU WANT? YOU ARE JOKING.”)

It’s sort of nuts to think that the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Home Computer came out in my lifetime. (It had a color display! Suck it, Commodore!) It is about the size of my Acer, as you can see from this ad, which pimps this baby’s “massive 48k of RAM.” You get down with your bad self, Spectrum.

I sometimes think about that first laptop; while it clearly sucked eggs, it outlasted the friendship, which should be the meaningful ending to a bittersweet story, but really I’m just glad I was able to melt that thing’s hard drive before anyone could find my shitty poems.*

* No, seriously, you guys.**

** No, seriously.