A monochrome laptop, hooking up to a 14.4k modem, going on a bbs, learning AT commands
It was nineteen ninety something before five, probably two or three. I must have been eleven or twelve years old.
My dad had a monochrome laptop.
486 25 MHz, monochrome screen, 4Mb ram, 40Mb hard drive. It was a fast machine. It ran MS DOS 5.0 and windows 3.11.
I had been allowed on it from day one. I used to (and still do) have a Sinclair ZX spectrum +2A so knew what a computer was and how to break it. I also knew how to fix the laptop when it broke. I made it run faster by loading dos into a ram-disk, I setup the mouse. I ran games on it. it was awesome. then dos 6.22 came out, so I installed that. it had colour, but I didn’t know that till much later on. it also had ‘help’ from which I learned how to make batch scripts to do all sorts of things: change the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to be better for games, reboot and load the game, etc. they were fun days.
 http://www.replacement-laptop-battery.info/