When it comes to technology, I’ve usually been behind the curve.

This first became apparent to me in the early 1980s when I was attending college.

Compact discs were just hitting the consumer market as the hot new audio commodity, and here I was just starting to build my impressive collection of LPs (you know, those 12-inch vinyl beauties you now have to go to a specialty music shop to find).

I recall having some fairly updated stereo equipment when I was growing up (anything with the name Pioneer on it was tops in my book), but somehow I seemed to have saved none of it by the time I went away to college. So I had to begin again, and my journey began at the bottom.

Make that the very bottom.

When I was a freshman, I marched down to one of the small department stores in town and purchased a combination radio/turntable/8-track player. Now the turntable was on its way to becoming passé in its own right, but the 8-track by this time was already a part of audio nostalgia. But this piece of equipment was cheap, and cheap suited me just fine in my first year of college.

In addition to my new stereo system, I bought the only 8-track recording I can recall ever owning: Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” which I played over and over. In fact, when I hear the album now, I know when in the selected songs the music would be interrupted by the 8-track cartridge changing tracks. No self-respecting music-lover would accept such an archaic recording process today on his or her MP3 player, but 8-tracks were popular in the ’60s and ’70s — need I say more?

When it came to computers, I was in step with the trend of the day for a brief moment. Then I played catch up for the next 15 years.

In 1990, I bought a Macintosh Portable. But with dimensions of 4.05 x 15.25 x 14.83 inches and a weight of 15.8 pounds, the moniker of “portable” was more of a cruel joke than an accurate description.

Apple had just come out with this marvel, and I was determined to be on the cutting edge with my first computer-buying experience. But while it served its basic function as a personal computer, it left a lot to be desired. For one thing, I bought the original version — and it was not back-lit, so the black-and-white screen was hard to read. And with features like a 16 MHz CPU, 40 MB of hard drive space and a whopping 8 MB of RAM, it wasn’t what I would call a workhorse.

Until last year, computers I’ve purchased were normally outdated by the time they came into my possession. This forced me to buy new auxiliary devices so I could use my computers with the latest software.

I must be the last person to still own an external drive for the 3.5-inch floppy disks that were popular on Macintosh computers ... whenever. I should sell it on eBay to a collector. If it no longer has a utilitarian purpose, maybe it can be put on display as a historic relic.

Jerry Moore is a news editor with Liberty Suburban Chicago Newspapers. He can be reached at jmoore@libertysuburban.com.