My History of Personal Computing
I’ve been using computer’s for a long time. Longer than I have a clear memory of that’s for sure. When I was a kid and I first saw Penny from Inspector Gadget’s notebook computer, I become obsessed with what computers could do for us.
Computers were expensive and my parents didn’t have a ton of money so I was destined to be behind the curve of technology by a few years. Luckily my father was a obsessed garage saler, every Saturday and Sunday we would be up at the crack of dawn getting to sales before everyone else, even knocking on doors and waking people up before they even started. He was a shrewd negotiator and we managed to pick up PC’s that were usually only 1 or two years behind market at bargain prices.
Coloeco Adam – 1987
This was my first exposure to computers, I was pretty young at the time. I mostly just figured out how to launch games, played Zaxxon on tape and get P4R Gaming boosting services. I was always mystified by the tape system Coleco used. The machine generated a “surge of electromagnetic energy” when it booted up and any tapes in the drive could be damaged, so you couldn’t leave any tapes in when you started it. I remember trying to write my first program in SmartBasic and not having much luck.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleco_Adam
Comodore 64 – 1989
This was the system that really got me into computers. It was the first time I was wowed by technology and I have a lot of great memories with my C64. As I mentioned my father was an avid garage saler and over the many years I used my C64 I collected about 5-6000 disks from garage sales. I could spend days pouring over my library of games, software, and demos trying random programs. It was great fun.
I didn’t do much programing on the C64, I mostly used the system for gaming, and occasionally making cool banners with Print Shop. I experienced my first truly engaging gaming experience on the C64 with Ultima V. At the time that game seemed hold unlimited possibilities, going back and playing it again I can barely play it.
The first digital music I ever heard was on a C64, it’s funny to think now, but at the time it totally blew my mind that you could use a computer to listen to music! I managed to find the demo of kung foo fighting that blew my mind and uploaded it to youtube. Hilarious in retrospect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rN-Mwblqbw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Print_Shop
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
Atari ST – 1989
I didn’t actually own a Atari ST, but my best friend at the time Shawn had one. I remember being very impressed by the window based UI, more advanced games, and super functional mouse. I had a mouse for my C64, but support was very spotty and it never seemed to work well. I spent a lot of time with his Atari, mostly playing Dungeon Master.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Master_%28video_game%29
Tandy 1000 HX – 1990
My first exposure to Microsoft. MS-DOS initially seemed like a step back in computer interfaces. However after a year or so of tinkering and after countless hours of messing around I managed to get MS-DOS 5.0 loaded up on this thing and things started to make more sense. This was a much more business oriented machine than anything else I had in the past, it didn’t even have a color monitor, at the time I thought it was pretty silly that it didn’t hook up to a TV.
One of my best experiences with this system I had involved the DOS version of tetris I has for this machine written by Alexey Pazhitnov and Dmitry Pavlovsky. It was a really weird easter egg where if you hit some key combination I’ve since forgot, it brought up this weird looking russian looking spreadsheet. At the time I was like 9 or 10 years old and thought I had discovered some secret spy shit, documents being transported to america secretly hidden in games. It was pretty exciting at the time. The easter egg is mentioned on a bunch of sites, but it appears as it’s never been publicly recorded.
http://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_HX
IBM Clone w/ i386SX – 1992
This when things started to get real computer wise for me. This was my first current computer and also the first computer my family ever bought new and current. I’m pretty sure they looked at it as an investment in my future (thanks folks) because it was quite expensive (2000$).
I think it took me 2 or three months before I discovered the local BBS scene and was completely hooked. Using the computer to interact directly with other people was the tipping point for me, I became completely obsessed. This was the point at which computers become a creation tool vs a consumption tool for me. I did a lot of great things with this computer, made a lot of great art, met a lot of great friends, it was a total world opener for me.
Stay tuned for Part II.