Gonzo Engaged today had a few threads about first computers. Sent me into a nostalgic tailspin.
Rough chronology of my life with computers.
1977 Binatone Pong Home Video Game aged 9 - me not Pong.
1980 Atari VCS awesome for its day.
1980 Our high school had an RM Nimbus and an Apple II. Cool.
1981 ZX81, a friend had one and we used to key in 2 A4 pages of code on the most useless membrane keyboard you could imagine to play a game in 1K of memory on a black and white display with no sound only for the loose power lead to fall out thus erasing the entire afternoon's work.
1980's - Kept bugging the guys in the Radio Shack (Tandy in the UK) store who let me mess about with their TRS-80's for hours playing wierd oil prospecting games.
1982 ZX Spectrum as above but with 16k, colour and a less crap rubber membrane keyboard.
1983 Oric-32 - Wierd french alternative to the Spectrum. Not very good.
1984 BBC Model B - Awesome in a word. ?399 in 1984. In 1985 Elite was launched on the BBC before anything else. It was the first superstar game and I recall being unable to contain myself during classes at school waiting to get back to it. In another world completely compared with anything else that had gone before.
1986 Atari ST.
1988 CBM Amiga.
1988 Dropped out of college having decided that COBOL programming and I would never get on and took a job in a small independent computer store in Glasgow. Great fun.
1989 Started selling PC's to businesses aged 20. 8088's, 286, 386's. £1,500 for 8Mb RAM.
1989 First 486 boxes released, £25k for a 486DX-25 fridge with 4Mb RAM. Slower than a snail on mogadon by today's standards.
1990 Sold one of the first 486 desktops in the UK.
1990 Sold many a customer on the virtues of IBM's MCA. Ahem.
1994 First own PC, a Pentium 100 flying machine. I got one of the flawed Pentiums, complained to Intel who were refusing to do anything about it unless you were going to use it to build bridges or rocketships. Over the previous weeks the flaw had been found to expose itself in calculations to 9,8 and 7 significant figures. I said to Intel, "At this rate it'll be getting whole number calculations wrong in about a month and a half." To my surprise they relented and agreed to replace mine. A day later they changed their global policy. I like to think it was me. I have witnesses to the phone call if you don't believe me.
2001 My current PC is a DIY box 1.2GHz AMD Athlon, 512Mb RAM, 90Gb Disk running Win XP, SuSE Linux, DOS, BeoS and other wierd shit I never use. Win XP mainly.
Oh, my PDA history is equally illustrious...
1988 Psion Organiser II
1990 Cambridge Z88 - very cool LCD screen sub notebook
1992 Psion Series 3
1993 Psion Series 3a
1997 Palm Pilot Professional
1999 Psion Series 5mx
2000 Handspring Visor
2000 Casio Cassiopeia E115 PocketPC - mp3 playing trick piece of kit which has entertained me in many an airport departure lounge and now sits in its cradle syncing all day long these days.
As a schoolkid I used to get PCW magazine from 1980-ish onwards. Although I was still in short trousers I watched from the sidelines (from afar in Glasgow, Scotland), as the IBM PC, GEM, Apple's Lisa et al came, went, stayed and or wrote history. There's much more I could share but its late and I'm too tired.
I feel like I've kinda been in the industry for 22+ years. I'm 33 years old. Ouch. How many other industries employ people with that kind of service so young? Apart from coal mining 100 years ago.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Rough chronology of my life with computers.
1977 Binatone Pong Home Video Game aged 9 - me not Pong.
1980 Atari VCS awesome for its day.
1980 Our high school had an RM Nimbus and an Apple II. Cool.
1981 ZX81, a friend had one and we used to key in 2 A4 pages of code on the most useless membrane keyboard you could imagine to play a game in 1K of memory on a black and white display with no sound only for the loose power lead to fall out thus erasing the entire afternoon's work.
1980's - Kept bugging the guys in the Radio Shack (Tandy in the UK) store who let me mess about with their TRS-80's for hours playing wierd oil prospecting games.
1982 ZX Spectrum as above but with 16k, colour and a less crap rubber membrane keyboard.
1983 Oric-32 - Wierd french alternative to the Spectrum. Not very good.
1984 BBC Model B - Awesome in a word. ?399 in 1984. In 1985 Elite was launched on the BBC before anything else. It was the first superstar game and I recall being unable to contain myself during classes at school waiting to get back to it. In another world completely compared with anything else that had gone before.
1986 Atari ST.
1988 CBM Amiga.
1988 Dropped out of college having decided that COBOL programming and I would never get on and took a job in a small independent computer store in Glasgow. Great fun.
1989 Started selling PC's to businesses aged 20. 8088's, 286, 386's. £1,500 for 8Mb RAM.
1989 First 486 boxes released, £25k for a 486DX-25 fridge with 4Mb RAM. Slower than a snail on mogadon by today's standards.
1990 Sold one of the first 486 desktops in the UK.
1990 Sold many a customer on the virtues of IBM's MCA. Ahem.
1994 First own PC, a Pentium 100 flying machine. I got one of the flawed Pentiums, complained to Intel who were refusing to do anything about it unless you were going to use it to build bridges or rocketships. Over the previous weeks the flaw had been found to expose itself in calculations to 9,8 and 7 significant figures. I said to Intel, "At this rate it'll be getting whole number calculations wrong in about a month and a half." To my surprise they relented and agreed to replace mine. A day later they changed their global policy. I like to think it was me. I have witnesses to the phone call if you don't believe me.
2001 My current PC is a DIY box 1.2GHz AMD Athlon, 512Mb RAM, 90Gb Disk running Win XP, SuSE Linux, DOS, BeoS and other wierd shit I never use. Win XP mainly.
Oh, my PDA history is equally illustrious...
1988 Psion Organiser II
1990 Cambridge Z88 - very cool LCD screen sub notebook
1992 Psion Series 3
1993 Psion Series 3a
1997 Palm Pilot Professional
1999 Psion Series 5mx
2000 Handspring Visor
2000 Casio Cassiopeia E115 PocketPC - mp3 playing trick piece of kit which has entertained me in many an airport departure lounge and now sits in its cradle syncing all day long these days.
As a schoolkid I used to get PCW magazine from 1980-ish onwards. Although I was still in short trousers I watched from the sidelines (from afar in Glasgow, Scotland), as the IBM PC, GEM, Apple's Lisa et al came, went, stayed and or wrote history. There's much more I could share but its late and I'm too tired.
I feel like I've kinda been in the industry for 22+ years. I'm 33 years old. Ouch. How many other industries employ people with that kind of service so young? Apart from coal mining 100 years ago.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.