Forrest M. Mims IIIInterview
Freelance writer, photographer, science consultant
Adapted from Forrest M. Mims III's interview on Uses This, published 25 August 2015. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
My third computer was an Altair 8800 that I received in return for writing the first operator's manual in 1975.
My third computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80.
I then bought a Radio Shack Model 100, the first truly portable computer that most anyone could afford.
The latter machine makes a nice photo album and browser, but Apple's word processor and spreadsheet were so primitive that I graduated to a highly productive tablet, Microsoft's Surface Pro 2 with an i5 processor.
It nicely fits inside a black Samsonite 10.1" Shuttle along with a mouse, cables, Netgear hotspot and a 2TB Passport Ultra (with 200,000+ photos and all my work).
Productivity
That machine allowed me to work with the highly complex Excel spreadsheets that compile, sort, analyze and graph my 25 years of atmospheric measurements (ozone layer, solar UV, photosynthetic radiation, haze, total water vapor and daily sun and sky photos).
I still like WP but have moved to Microsoft Word for better compatibility.
Lotus 1-2-3 was long my preferred spreadsheet.
After Lotus faded away, I moved to Excel and OpenOffice.
I now use Excel and LibreOffice.
Notes
For many years WordPerfect was my favorite word processor.
Other
In 2014 I graduated to the Surface Pro 3 with an i7 processor.