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About Me |
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.