First personal computer nostalgia

From: Iggy Drougge <optimus_at_canit.se>
Date: Thu Nov 16 03:51:06 2000

A short history of personal microcomputing:

Well, I started in the early fifties with a relay calculator. Boy, did it
click a lot.

Err, no, actually, the first time I saw a computer was in a985 when I went
with my parents (who'd just become publishers) to a shop with a lot of
strange TVs and typewriters which ran on electricity.
They bought a Commodore PC-109 (256 k RAM, double 5.25" floppies, green
screen), though what I mostly remember about it is the screaming
dot-matrix printer. The next year, they bought a Bondwell portable with
3.5" floppies. The screen visibility was horrible.
One day, in the late eighties, there was a little computer with a blueish
screen instead of the green-screened beast. A Mac SE, running Quark XPress
(to think that quark would run on such a machine!). I played my first
computer game on that one (Tetris). A while later, a Mac II and
Laserwriter were added for layout purposes. And the games (all two of
them) ran in colour! What a marvel.
What's odd about this is that I hardly ever touched a computer. They were
wolely for work, and too expensive. I did get a NES the christmas of 1990,
though, and had been glancing at a Commodore 64 due to the ads in the
comics, where the C= bastards had simply pasted a photo into the screen. I
wonder how many kids were fooled by that (perhaps just those of us from
the country).
It wasn't until 1992, when I was at the library and found a copy of
"Datormagazin", a Commodore (mainly Amiga, by that date) magazine. The
computer games were nothing like the eight-bit console games, and you
could use the computer for such marvelous applications! At this date, I
made up my mind to get an Amiga 500. At the end of the summer, I moved to
a nw school and the after-school activites actually included a computer
room, entirely equipped with Amiga 500s! Such bliss. Since I hadn't yet
found an affordable Amiga of my own, I was there throughout the
afternoons, even though the computers were too busy for me to have one for
more than an hour. I looked into the few, old books about computing at the
school library and started writing BASIC programs, at first on paper, and
then in AmigaBASIC (Microsoft, whee!).
Then, exactly eight years ago, I bought my first computer of my own. In
fact, I bought two. I couldn't refuse the ad selling an Amiga 500 and a
Commodore 64 with disk drive (which has never worked, and will soon be
converted into a SCSI CD case). Two computers for the price of one! From
then on, I've been with the Amiga.

1992 Amiga 500 and C64
1993 Amiga 1200
1994 HD for Amiga 1200, 80 MB (my only HD until last year)
1995 C128D (metal model), swapped for a pirate copy of "Superfrog"
1996 28 MHz 68020 Blizzard accelerator for A1200
1997 486 from a friend of the family, wasn't put into use until last year
1998 Atari 520ST, from a friend, broken
1999 I start at the uni, get student grants and my passion may finally be
     unleashed.
1999 Amiga 4000
1999 I buy loads of C64s, C128s, STs, Dragon, MSX, Macs, PS/2s,
-2000 DECstations, old Amigas, etc.

My computer collecting mania has only been made possible in the last year,
but I am nevertheless quickly running out of living space!
Received on Thu Nov 16 2000 - 03:51:06 GMT