My first Mac was a Mac Plus, which I paid about $1,800 bucks for, and eventually got it to 4Meg of RAM for something like $400. My daughter was about 18 months old when I had this machine. She was an early walker and climber, and was completely fascinated by the Mac. Whenever I'd get out of my chair, she'd come running over, climb up on it, start banging away at the keyboard and playing with the mouse.

After losing some work to her explorations one night, but not wanting to curb her enthusiasm for the computer, I decided to unplug the keyboard from the Mac one night as I needed to make a bathroom run. (The Mac Plus had an RJ45-like connector on the front of the case for the keyboard, below the monitor, and a telephone-like curly cable). I carefully tucked the cable behind the keyboard so it wouldn't be visible to her, and headed toward the bathroom. She wouldn't notice the difference, right? Wrong.

Sure enough, Malia jumped up on my chair before I got 10 feet away from it, and starting pressing the keys and moving the mouse. She got a really confused look on her face, looked at the keyboard, then the mouse, moved them around a bit more, and knew something was wrong. She moved her head closer to the Mac, and an enlightened look came over her face. She reached behind the keyboard, pulled out the cable, and plugged the cable into the plug in front of the Mac in one swift move. A few quick clicks on the keyboard and a bit of mouse movement, the smile came back to her face and off she went.

Try getting an 18 month old to troubleshoot a hardware problem on a WinTel machine!