The truth be told: I’m a nerd.

Last night I watched an amazing special on CNBC, a documentary about Macintosh fanatics called “MacHeads” that finally put into perspective something that Sam has known (and I’ve suspected) for years: I’m a nerd.

I was drawn into nerdland by my first husband Milt, a ham radio enthusiast and the undisputed King of All Nerds, who noodled around on a 5K Commodore VIC-20 computer as far back as 1980. We advanced to the Commodore 64 two years later, and in 1984 I saw my first Mac when it was still brand new on the market and prohibitively expensive. I sold my soul to buy one the following year and never owned anything else since.

Yes, it’s a cult. I’m a nerd and I admit it. This is what happens to tech pioneers.

In true nerdlike fashion I can recite every Mac I’ve ever owned, including the RAM, the ROM, the size of the hard drives, the year I bought them and the software I used. Actually, my first three Macs had no hard drives at all; the operating system, fonts (there were only three: Helvetica, Times and Courier) and software fit on a single 400K floppy disk with room to spare.

I had the first editions of Adobe Illustrator and PageMaker in 1988 and bought the very first inkjet printer that same year, a Hewlett Packard DeskWriter, for $1,200 even though it only printed in one color (black) and nobody had bothered to invent compatible inkjet paper to go with it. It took six months of trial-and-error to finally discover the only inkjet-friendly paper on the market — Neenah’s Classic Crest Solar White — and I even wrote an article about it for MacUser magazine. (I’m not joking about this.) Until that time I’d been plodding along with a 72dpi dot-matrix AppleWriter because nobody in my universe could afford a laser printer. (The average price in the late 1980s was still $6,500.) I finally bought my first 20-megabyte hard drive in 1991 for $795.

So why am I telling you all this? Because my iMac G5 is already five years old, and this spring I’m planning to buy a new iMac with a 27-inch display that blows high-definition out of the water. It’s truly a thing of beauty, equipped with 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2560 x 1440 resolution, 4GB of memory, a 1TB hard drive, wireless keyboard and Super Mouse, 8x double-layer SuperDrive and ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics. And it actually sells for far less than my first Mac back in 1985, which cost almost $2,000. I LOVE PROGRESS. (And please don’t tell Sam, but I also love Steve Jobs.) Thank you for reading this.