My computing history
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It must have been sometime in the 80’s when I first saw a computer. Of course I’d seen calculators and even a game console before, but a computer was something else.
back to the future
My earliest memory of seeing and actually touching a computer is one that takes me back to the street I lived and grew up in, in Limbricht, a little village in the south of The Netherlands.
It was the boy who lived two houses next to ours, who owned the obscure device, and that fact alone practically made him my best friend of the moment.
Heck. He was the whole neighbourhood’s best friend of the moment.
ZX Spectrum Microcomputer, Sinclair, 1982
Image courtesy of Computer History Museum.
After this I had a few other new best friends of the moment who had a Commodore 64 and an Atari.
Sony Hit Bit MSX
Image courtesy of Computer History Museum.
This was the first computer I actually owned. It had a cartridge for games and also a separate tape recorder to load and save programs. (This was before the term Applications was hip to use, leave alone Apps)
I remember playing the first Metal Gear on this with a friend. Lots of sleepless nights. Also, I remember writing simple BASIC on this, creating question games and even venturing into having an image (sprites anyone?) move across the screen controlled by a joystick.
BBC Microcomputer System
Image courtesy of Computer History Museum.
When I went to high school around 1985/1986 we had a designated computer room full of these British computers by Acorn. A little later I would actually own an Acorn Archimedes and an Acorn RISC PC.
These were awesome machines. The RISC OS was unlike anything at the time. Trouble was, there were not many developers creating software for it. It died a slow death.
fast-forward. the 90’s.
During the nineties – I was still studying Film Studies – I had a Dell PC with Windows XP. I blame Microsoft for the fact it took me 8 years to earn my Master’s degree. Slow…
back to the future part II
Now, back in the present time, well as of 2008, I switched to an iMac and never looked back.
Until I wrote up this little micro history that is…