The History of Computers as Winona Knew it

1983: Winona helps her father to build an Apple II clone from scratch. Her small fingers are just the right size for holding resistors, capacitors, transistors, light-emitting diodes and memory chips as they are being soldered onto the motherboard.

1985: To spread her love of computers, Winona makes St. Valentine's Day greeting cards for all of her classmates using Broderbund's Print Shop and a black and white Star dot-matrix printer. Her entire kindergarten class is amazed and delighted with their cards, as computers are the stuff of science fiction, and the "grown up" world. Instant bragging rights are granted to a pack of know-it-all rug rats who've had a brief brush with the products of technology.

Winona also amuses herself with a set of speakers, a sound card and a speech synthesis program called SAM.

1986: Winona goes online for the first time. She dials up to the house of a Computer Science student from York University.

1987: Winona receives her first IBM PC Compatible.

1988: Winona buys a colour Star dot-matrix printer and gives away her old printer to her younger cousin, Hilly.

1990: Winona receives a 386. She refuses to edit the autoexec.bat file to start up the Windows 3.0 shell automatically upon boot up because she prefers interacting with the DOS command line.

1993: Winona upgrades to a 486. She goes on the Internet for the first time using the Toronto Freenet. Her browser of choice is Lynx. There is only enough bandwidth on her 2400 Baud modem for text transfer at a reasonable rate.

1994: Winona gets a 14.4 Kpbs Modem.

1996: Winona builds a classic Pentium. She signs up for a real (PPP) dial-up Internet account with now-defunct local ISP, skyinternet.com using the alias, "Princess Toadstool". She buys a 28.8 Kbps modem. Netscape 3 is still king.

1997: Winona meets an entity by the name of Mimming on ICQ random chat. She gets a 56K modem.

1998: Winona upgrades to a Pentium 233 with MMX. Equipped with the original ATI All-in-Wonder, her computer becomes a video editing studio. She also experiences the power of broadband Internet. Oh, the rush!

1999: Winona acquires a Pentium III 450 and a Celeron 400. She enrolls in the Computer Engineering program at the University of Waterloo.

2000: Winona wins an Intel webcam and Acer scanner at a Christmas party thrown by Tatung Canada.

2002: Winona builds a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GB of RAM as a birthday present to herself. She soups up her workstation with an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 DV, Hercules Game Theatre XP, 19" CRT monitor and a Wacom Intuos 2 tablet.

2003: Winona buys the 4 Megapixel Samsung Digimax V4 for her brother as a birthday present, but ends up borrowing it a lot. Mimming sends Winona a 10 GB generation 2 iPod. Winona treats herself to a V505 Series Sony Vaio with 1.6 GHz Pentium M processor, Centrino Technology, and 1 GB of RAM for Christmas.

2004: After weeks of research and comparison, Winona chooses a Sony DSC-W1 to be her first digital camera.

2005: Winona gives her brother a G4 Mac mini as an upgrade to the 400 MHz Celeron that he inherited. Winona gets a job in Silicon Valley upon graduation.

2006: Winona joins the club of elite, trendy geek hipsters with her 2.0 GHz Duo Core Macbook with 1 GB RAM. However, she ends up letting her brother take the 1-month old Macbook home with him after spending the Christmas holidays in Silicon Valley.

2008: Winona receives an XO laptop from Mimming. Winona also inherits Mimming's old 8 GB Generation 2 iPod nano in exchange for replacing her wretched PPC-6700 with a sexy iPhone. The motherboard on her 5 year old Sony Vaio fails. She purchases the 14.7 MP Canon SD990 IS to replace her 4 year old point-and-shoot digital camera. Mimming gives Winona a 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor Macbook Pro with 2GB RAM and 250 GB HDD for Christmas and Winona gives herself a Nikon D90 for Christmas.

2009: Winona and Mimming acquire matching Nintendo DSi's.

2010: Winona gets an HTC Evo 4G by attending Google I/O.

2011: Winona gets a Black 3G 64GB iPad 2 and a 32GB Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and a 6th generation 16 GB iPod nano.

2012: Winona gets a Samsung Galaxy Nexus and an 8 GB ASUS Nexus 7 tablet by attending Google I/O.

2013: Mimming gives Winona an early birthday present upon the death of her old laptop: a 15" Macbook Pro with Retina Display, 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM and 768 GB SSD.

2015: Winona jumps ship and gives the iOS ecosystem a shot with a 128 GB Space Gray iPhone 6 Plus. It proves to be superior to Android phones by giving her a leg up in Ingress competitions.

2017: Winona and Mimming play Nintendo Switch games. But mostly Mimming. And mostly the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

2018: Winona upgrades to an iPhone XS Max and continues her undefeated streak in Ingress competitions.

2019: Winona achieves the peak of her fitness while playing Pokemon GO.