Technically, My first was my dad's ZX80, but I never did much with it. The first computer I bought myself was back in '02. A dell inspiron tower with peripherals running Win98, 1024x monitor, office printer, and a copy of XP... for $40 at a library auction. 10 hours later and a copy of visual studio, and I was a happy teen.

Carpe Diem la Iesous, Aaron, ComposerDude

How about a completely new design for a filesystem? There are already a number of semantic ideas for filesystem i.e. the intelligently half-cooked SemFS and the still yet-to-be-delivered WinFS. What some people need to do (i.e. ME) is get off our bums and work out a truly workable semantic filesystem that actually works in the real world. "It would essentially be a journaled relational filesystem, removing the need for a relational db index and exposing all metadata as well as relationships according to filetype, while maintaining the attributes of traditional filesystems." 1[^]

Carpe Diem la Iesous, Aaron, ComposerDude

Oh, come on guys! When files are created or moved, relevant dates are already recorded for the files. The real problem is that we have no quick way to expose meta and relationships through a search index. The closest anybody has come to implementing it is 'Spotlight' on Mac OS X. Seriously, our filesystems are the root of the problem: indexing eats the harddrive, it eats the processor on some PCs, and it eats the RAM... all because our filesystems aren't dynamic enough.

Carpe Diem la Iesous, Aaron, ComposerDude

I think that the main problem with *nix is that most distro do not focus on the needs or applications of their userbase. This goes for Windows as well, but we're talking Unix/Linux here, and Red Hat is the most notorious and infamous offender here. It would great if Ubuntu and a few other popular distros devs would get their collective acts together and not just develop for themselves. I'd love improvements to the command line, etc. Man is useful, but a pain if you're in the middle of editing scripts in VIM or doing something intensive that you really don't want to waste time 'man-ing'. It's that aspect of every distro wanting to do things their own way. It's nice, but in the end, if they want to cover more ground find more use by developers and end-users alike... they should listen to us and accept our open source suggestions.

Gotta love linux