How did I get into computers
Growing up in the 80ies, I was luckily enough to witness the boom of home-computing.
At a young ago I got my first TV console a Pong clone , I am pretty sure it was a
Tandy/Realistic model but I cannot find the exact one.
It had a gun, paddles and blew my mind.
Then around the age of 12 a local toy-store which had previously carried the Atari 2600
, started to sell Colecovision and it’s first iteration of a home computer , called
the Colecovision Adam.
Since it had a printer and was struggling with typing classes my parents decided to buy
this for me, it basically sparked my whole interest in computers in general.
ADAM
How a fork changed my route in computing
The son of that local toy-store came to our house to install and explain the Colecovision
ADAM to me. He was a graduate student in IT and asked me which study-direction I was going
to take.
I told him I wanted to be a translator since I had a knack for learning languages, I learned French,German and English just by watching television and reading comics/books before I even learned those languages at school.
Computers did interest me a lot but I was bad at mathematics due my lack of finding it
usefull. He then somehow convinced me to take the more difficult path and I re-inscribed
in the same school but going for a Programmer degree … mathematics would bite me in the
ass until I quit school.
You cannot have everyting in life
I had the luck of finding a trash-dumped 8086 en route to my local swimming-pool.
The person who was putting out the trash, told me they were a DTP bureau and it had
been written off in their accounting.
It was the bare case with 5 1/4 floppy, no video-card, no keyboard , no monitor.
So after I had to go back there with my mother and had the same man explain to her ,
I hadn’t stolen the PC , my parents saved up and bought the remaing parts for it.
In school we were using Tulip PC’s (a Dutch brand) and as such I had a computer to do
my school-work on.
BUT at a local computer club here in my home-town suddenly there was a guy , who was sitting alone at a table playing back a voice through his speakers of his monitor.
Me and the other PC owners rushed to his table, it was the RedSector MegaDemo on his
Amiga 500 , from that moment I fell in love with the Demoscene and really wanted a 16-bit
machine.
The only sound I had was the beeps that came out of my PC speaker.
A shop that sold office supplies also sold software in a little section of their shop.
I would go there to buy my PC games but they had a little corner next to it with all these
beautifull machines, their grey-coloured cases, the stripes, no bulky-desktops, so much colours on their screens.
They were a local Atari dealer and I fell in love with the ST, its mouse, GEM …
So after finding out an ST floppy-drive could also read DOS diskettes I convinced my parents to visit the store and buy me an ST.
One day I came home from school, and there was a huge box sitting in my room.
But my enjoyment quickly turned to sorrow, it was no ST , it was an XT .
I tried to convince my parents to return it and exchange it for an ST but no
luck , my father made it very clear , I should count my blessings on even getting
a computer. ( reflecting on this as an adult, knowing the price they paid , I was spoiled )
So there I sat disappointed in my room with my Zenith Eazy-PC
ZENITH
The way forward
I moved to a 286 afterwards , discovered cracktro’s, PC Demoscene, 300 baud modems
eventually ending with a 386-DX I bought using my godfather’s saving-account.
PC’s had evolved, we had VGA, Soundblasters, and the Demoscene exploded.
However I still checked on the other ANSI/Music/Demoscenes thanks to BBSes.
Until I had ranked up such a huge phonebill that my mother pulled the literal plug.
So many fond memories of those 4 years on BulletinBoards.
Life as an adult
My 386DX survived Y2K and I used it extensively until 2002 when a friend kindly told
me to get with the times and gave me a Pentium-II with Windows.
I didn’t really have to urge to move to Windows, I was using my 386DX without Internet
, DigitalResearch DOS 6.0 and GEM (for DOS) as a GUI.
After being bit again by the retro-bug first in collecting Apple PowerPC’s I finally
started owning Atari’s. First an 130XE and then finally an 1040STfm .
By now I have so many PowerPC’s and 8-16bit Atari’s mainly and attend Atari meetings/events.