I'm into the computers since 1996. For a long time I didn't have my own machine but in 20/05/2000 I've bought my first one. It was used AMD Am486DX4-Plus: 100MHz, 16Mb RAM, 2Gb HDD, 2Mb video card, 14" SVGA monitor, 16-bit soundcard, 8x CD-ROM. It was neither fast nor cheap (for those $290 I could find even Pentium-MMX), but it was MY OWN, if you know what I mean. Then, after 3 month its hard drive has died and I lost everything that I had. For next 3 month I've been saving money for new HDD and I've bought 10Gb one ($106).
And 23/05/2001 I've bought new motherboard, CPU Intel Celeron 433 and 64Mb RAM and 25/05 I've bought 32Mb nVidia Riva TNT2 Pro videocard and assembled new PC.  5/07/2001 I've overclocked CPU up to 540 MHz and 9/072001 I've bought more 64Mb RAM. I've spent $204 for upgrade. So I think it's pretty good system. For now.

I'm not good at progranning though I like it. These are freeware :-) programs wrote by myself therefore they haven't good interface (but they have bugs). Actually, it was my first attempt to use MS Visual Basic. All you need to run them is at least last edition of MS Windows 95 (98 preferably).

ATTENTION! Since these programs are exe-files and AIDS is awake, You'd be bewaring! The guarantees in this world are unsteady thing but I assure You that these programs aren't viruses.

mcs20 -  this program convert units of Metric System into British-American units and in visa versa (zipped, 19Kbytes).

globe20 -  this program calculate the distance between 2 points on the Globe (zipped, 11Kbytes).

flcl11 - this program is a check-list of foreign language proficiency (zipped, 19 Kbytes)

Interesting in programming? My friend's page. He's programmer. He writes some funny stuff, something like vector graphics programs!