Computer History

I made a post on a forum about my “computer history” and thought I’d share it here on my blog, for the sake of nostalgia.

First computer in the house:

Amstrad Word Processor. Also good for Basic, text adventures and chess.

A bit hazy on the order, but:

Amstrad 464. Games and more Basic programming. Save your games to cassette tape!

And then I got the next model up! An Amstrad 6128, with a colour monitor and a disk drive. The games loaded sooooo fast!

That one was mine. My brother got a black and white TV, so didn’t need a monitor. He got:

ZX Spectrum +2

Next up, Amiga 500:

This was actually usable as a word processor, for image creation, even making animated movies. Also the sound on this system was way ahead of any other system. Oh yeah… it had a mouse!

And then, Amiga 1200:

This motherfucker had a HARD DRIVE! Enough to store something like 20 floppy disks worth of games for super fast loading. And 2MB of RAM. Awesome! I did my first music sequencing with this one.

To be clear, I never bought any of these new. Always second hand, so I was always a bit behind the curve.

Then I bought a 386 PC, with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I used it to run Cubasis, a very streamlined midi sequencer which could control my keyboard. Yay.

I guess it looked a bit like this (just like every PC tower case).

Next was 486. It was a bit better.

Next was a Pentium computer, which was my first ever brand new computer. Windows 98! It ran the latest games, and had a 20gb Hard Drive. I put in a Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live card, with a breakout port in the front slots where a CD drive would go. Now I could do audio recording, and play back multiple tracks in real time without lags and skips. I upgraded a few times, and added a DVD drive.

I then bought an all-new PC system, but only used it for a few months. I bought a Macbook for traveling, intending to use the more powerful PC when at home. It turned out that once I got used to OSX, I could never face going back to Windows XP.

As I bought the Macbook as a travel laptop, it was a bit underpowered right from the start. So a few years later I upgraded to a waaaaay more expensive MacBook Pro.

15 inch high res screen, SSD hard drive, 8 GB RAM. Super fast and works perfectly as a desktop (with an external monitor) and for traveling. I also run Windows 7. Moore’s Law kind holds true for me, but I think the price went up each time too.