My History with Computers

Computers have been a hobby of mine every since I was about 9 or 10 years old. I'm sure many people in my situation can list off the different machines they used. I find it fun to think about the computers I used to use and how things have changed, and continue to change.

My timeline of computer usage, the year is when I started using the machine:

Dragon 32

The Dragon32 was launched in 1981 and was a very advanced machine for its time but did not achieve a great market share. The company, Dragon Data Ltd., were based in Wales and distribution of the computer was limited to Europe as I believe. I think a very similar machine was the Tandy TRS-80. My dad bought a Dragon32 around 1984 and taught me to program in BASIC on it. It was the first computer that we owned and I can't look at a picture of it without thinking of it with some fondness. I remember starting to program in BASIC when I was about 9 years old and saving programs to tape cassette. I also remember playing a variety of great games on the Dragon too. Games that I wouldn't mind playing again this day. I'm sure there are other versions for recent architectures and emulators out there though but I guess I'm not motivated enough to go find out. It's very nice to look back though at the first computer I used and smile about the ancient specification.

Amiga 500

To explain something for the non-Amigans out there: Chip RAM was the name given to the memory accessible to the co-processor chips only. These co-processor chips actually had priority over the CPU and the CPU would have to wait if it needed access to the memory. Expanded RAM was called 'Fast RAM' as it was only accessible by the CPU and because it did not have to wait for the co-processor chips then it made the machine faster.

The Amiga 500 was released in 1987 but I didn't see one myself until November 1989 when my dad and I went to the Commodore Show. We bought an Amiga 500 and I remember being blown away by how much improved everything was over the old Dragon I had become used to. I remember being amazed at the speed of floppy disks (!) Yes, it seems ludicrous now as I curse the slowness of floppy disks and sneer at their use over that of network transfer but when I had been used to a tape drive, floppy disks were heavenly.

I got into computer games a lot more since the graphics were far improved from the simple pixelated images that the Dragon produced. I also experimented with programming some more too although I think I did less actual programming on this machine than I did on any other computer that I've owned, including the Dragon.

Amiga 1200

When we got this computer in January 1994, I did not expect that it would be effectively the LAST Amiga made. Not very long after I had it, Commodore went in to bankruptcy. Although the step from the Amiga 500 to the Amiga 1200 was not as great as when I had been used to the Dragon32, the improvement was none the less impressive. This was the first computer I had owned that had a hard drive in it. Only 120MB, paltry by today's standards - and probably back then too, this was real *storage* for me as I had grown up with using floppy disks on the Amiga 500 and tape cassettes before then.

I took this computer to college with me that year we got it (1994) and taught myself C programming on it. The following year I was living with friends in a student house and at the end of that year I got on the internet for the first time at home with my A1200. Its internet connection was via a 38400 baud serial link to a friend's 386 PC running Linux. This PC had the 28.8kb modem in it that three of us used to connect to the internet.

As things worked out, this was the last Amiga I owned too. With the demise of Commodore and the subsequent failure of any company to resurrect the platform, Escom, the German PC maker went bankrupt trying, the technical specification of the Amiga was getting very tired-looking indeed. This meant I looked elsewhere to further my quest for more computing power and with PCs increasing dramatically in processing and graphics power I drifted from the Amiga platform.

PCs

Something I found wonderful about PCs was the availability and price of commodity PC hardware. This meant (from the start) that I was able to buy the components I wanted and build the PC as I saw fit. This was a dramatic change for me coming from the fairly 'closed' world of Amiga hardware where prices were much higher because the economies of scale were not nearly as great as in the PC world. It was these commodity components actually that allowed me to sell on the PC while still keeping a few items that I could use on my next computer. How to reference this computers is a little harder, but mostly when I've built a machine it's been around a particular processor, so those are what I'll give to differentiate them.

486 DX4/133 PC

My first PC, and the start of my usage of Linux, the operating system that has grown in recognition and popularity in recent times. My 486 was not a very fast machine, but it got me into the world of Linux plus got me started on games for the PC. I made a few upgrades and I was starting to enjoy using the PC more than the Amiga. This PC was named 'galileo' merely because the name of the astronomer sounded good.

AMD K6-2/300 PC

By the time I had upgraded to this computer I wasn't using the Amiga at all and it had become just another legacy. It's a bit sad to see a machine (and a whole architecture) pass like that but it's inevitable if that architecture is no longer actively supported and kept up with technology. The Amiga 1200 was based on 1992 technology and I was in 1998. 6 years of stagnation is a very long time in the computer world as anyone familiar with it will tell you :)

I had been interested by 3D in games for a while now and I realised I wanted to enjoy the vast array of 3D games that had become popular (and still are popular today) and so I purchased a 3D accelerator card - And I've never looked back!

When I moved to the USA in 1999, TWA managed to destroy the case so I re-housed it in the same style of case but there is one less 5.25" bay. Be careful travelling with computers! .. I took the hard drives as carry-on (wrapped in foil, then bubble wrap and then in a tin), which probably saved my data.

By 2001, the machine was beginning to show its age, just like the Amiga before it. I installed more memory, taking it from 64MB to 384MB since RAM is very cheap.

IDT WinChip200 PC

This lowly machine began as a gift for my wife-to-be (back then) Cindy. She and I were not able to be together with me living in England and her in the USA. Talking online was possible, but for a number of months Cindy was without a computer at home and she could only get online from the university computer lab which was awkward sometimes for timing. So for the Christmas of 1998 I decided to take over a computer that she could use to get online from home. It was a nice surprise and totally unexpected when I turned up at the airport with it :)

A fairly simple little computer this machine then became my Linux box at work and although it was not upgraded at all since I got it it was much faster and much better behaved under Linux than Windows (big surprise!). This machine served well, until I 'retired' it from service in December 2001, it was replaced by the Dual Pentium Pro machine. Most of this machine was given as a gift to a friend of my wife.

Sun SPARC Classic

The little machines are very compact and very well built. I decided to get one after reading about them and I was also interested in trying a different architecture other than PC for a change. After my Amiga days it is fun to play with another type of machine, and these little SPARC Classic's are just so CUTE! :) I also thought I could use one effectively as a gateway for a home network. This cute little machine is pretty much an 'ornament' these days.

Dual Pentium Pro

This machine is a more capable Linux server than my previous one, the IDT WinChip 200 based machine. It again carries the name 'Delphis'. Although still at 200Mhz, it has twice the RAM and much more hard drive space. I also wanted to get a black case for this one, since it is something I have learnt in my years of building computers that the case of the computer is far more important than keeping the components from falling on the floor. Cooling, expansion, ease of working are all critical factors.

I gathered the parts to put together this machine over a period of time, since there was no real rush to put it together. It started off service just before the turn of the new year to 2002.

AMD XP2200+

This computer bore the name 'Ceres' once again and was in use as a Windows-only system.