I have been interested in computers since I was a child. I owned many computers and consoles in my life, some of them survived till today.
The first computer I could see and use was a Commodore 64. It was of a friend of mine’s, that world was fascinating me. At the age of 8 II got my first consolle, a Nintendo Entertainment System. Then I owned a Sega Master System II and finally, when I was 11 I got my first Commodore 64.
LOAD
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
Loading games was so slow that I sayd to myself: “Hey, what can you do with just turning on the computer?”. It was programming in BASIC. So I borrowed a BASIC programming book from the local library and started to write some simple programs. I still own my Commodore 64.
AN INTUITION
My neighbour lent me his “old” Amiga 500 in late 1995. Amiga was already in its decline, finding new software for the Amiga was really hard.
But my neighbour also left me a pile of floppy disks with games and other software. I don’t own it anymour, but Amiga is still one of my favourite computers. I really miss it.
I continued programming even on this platform and really loved AmigaBASIC.
586 SUPER POWERS
In the 1997 I’ve got my first IBM Compatible PC. It was an amazing machine, with 180Mhz Pentium processor, a Matrox Mystique graphic board, Sound Blaster 32 audio board, 16 MBytes of RAM and 2 GBytes Hard Drive. Some friends thought I got the NASA computer.
Everything was nice, but when I saw Windows 95 for the first time I was a bit disappointed…there were “folders” instead of “drawers”, there was a better screen resolution and much more colors than the Amiga… but the Operating System wasn’t so much better… and QuickBasic wasn’t so advanced as AmigaBASIC… but then I started to study at the High School and Borland Pascal was the most common programming language at school and started some programming with it.
I also started programming in Visual Basic 4 and 5 and my first program for managing a bakery saw the light on 2001. It was rewritten in 2005 in Visuali Basic 6 and it’s still used.
I stil have this computer, but I don’t know if it still works.
/bin/bash
At the university I started to work with both Windows XP and Linux. Knoppix was my first linux distro and then installed Slackware.
Hopefully the Laptops of that era had a resolution of 1024×768, so using standard VESA settings was enough. I remember changing the screen resolution in Slackware was a pain in the ass. You had to modify the XF86 config file, adjusting the monitor’s refresh rate and resolution mode.
The forbidden Apple
In 2006 I was still studying computer science and found a job as Website programmer. In this period I could try some Apple computers, and fall in love with good old Mac OS X Tiger. It was so much beautiful and powerful that I really wanted to buy a Mac. But it was (and still is) so expensive… what struck me about the Mac was that it was a Unix operating system with a very cool GUI.
One day in the office there was an old PowerMacintosh G3 that was near to be thrown away. I adopted him and still have it. I’m trying to figure out if I can install Linux or BSD and bring him to a new life.
Eye of the Tiger…paws of the Snow Leopard
I changed company in 2007 and put some money in the bank so in 2008 I could buy mi first second-hand MacbookPro. It came with Mac OS X Tiger, but, in the meanwhile, Snow Leopard was released. I really loved it, and Mac OS 10.6 is my favourite Mac OS version, even if I really missed the “metal” look of Tiger’s windows.
I still own it but it has sadly reached the end of its life. It doesn’t turn on anymore.
And now?
My computer is still an Apple Macbook Pro. It’s a Mid-2014 I bought at the beginning of 2015.
