A Personal Computer History (4) : Macworld

In 1995 i graduated from university and began work in one of the first web design agencies, actually it was a traditional print design agency dipping its toes in the then new world of the web (Netscape 2.0 was still in beta, thats how prehistoric this was). Most of the people in the company used Macintoshes and naturally after a while i wanted to get one myself...

Macintosh SE, where it all started

My first Mac was a Macintosh SE i bought second hand from a Cash Converters. It worked fine though the floppy drive had an annoying flaw in that while it could read floppy discs it had formatted itself fine these discs were unreadable in any other Mac and the same with floppies from elsewhere. My first Mac was an island therefore, though i was able to use a Localtalk bridge and Ethernet to access the SE from an iMac later on...

Mac Plus

The iMac yes, my first proper and brand new Mac was a Bondi Blue iMac. This replaced the Tulip PC as my main computer and set my computing down a new design and not programming orientated path. I've still got the iMac (and indeed the SE) though i'm unsure if it works. The last time i was using it i was trying to use OpenBSD on it and configure X Windows.

Over the years i managed to accumulate a mountain of Macs... at one stage i had over 18. I've still got many of them now including a PowerMac 7200, Mac IIci, a Macintosh LCIII, a Workgroup Server 60, a Mac Plus and my pride and joy a Mac 512K (which was the second ever model). I use this as a stand for my digital clock.

Workgroup Server 60 atop a tower of LCs and Mac IIs

Nowadays i'm on my second Macbook though of course nowadays it is used with a plethora of other devices including a Chromebook Pixel and an iPhone SE. We've come a long way from Pong clones and Cheese Nibbler for sure.

A Personal Computer History (3) : The PC world

After our third microcomputer, a BBC Model B, blew up it was time to "progress" to the PC world. The Amstrad PC was by then becoming popular being cheap enough for many to consider (though still expensive compared to today). We got a PC1640DD, 1MB of RAM, double 5.25" floppy drives and a CGA colour monitor. It might not seem much these days but it was a quantum leap after the days of loading programs off cassette tape. We upgraded the Amstrad PC a lot, adding a 3.5" floppy drive and a 32MB hard drive. Although a crude plastic machine in many ways it was also pretty robust and reliable.

By now we were in the early 1990s and i was at university, thus armed with my student grant (yes we got paid to be students back then) i decided it was time i bought my own computer. My first was an Amstrad too, a PPC512, so a kind of crude laptop. I didn't like it though and soon sold it on buying a Zenith minisport instead. This was a small notebook a bit like the Macbook and Chromebook Pixel i use these days though of course much less advanced.

The minisport had no hard drive though had a RAM drive and MS-DOS was installed on a ROM. The minisport had a 2" floppy drive, which was cute though no other computer used this format and getting the disks was difficult. Luckily it came with an external 3.5" floppy drive too though this made it rather less portable. The screen was quite nice as it was a backlit LCD though was a rather strange resolution as can be seen from the photograph above. 640 by 300 so any pie charts would be a bit squashed.

A year or so later i bought my first desktop PC, a Unisys with a mighty 386SX-33 CPU! This also had a hard drive so could be used for some decent computing. I had Windows 3.1 on it and did some Pascal and Visual BASIC programming and the like, useful for my degree in Software Engineering anyway. The 4MB RAM was later doubled to 8 (my present for graduating!) and i bought an external CD-ROM drive so i could install OS/2 Warp on it. It was just about usable...

Finally a number of years later i upgraded to a Tulip PC with a 100MHz 486 CPU. This i ran Windows 95 on. A fine computer but by now i was working at a design agency full of Apple Macintoshes... that would soon guide my next computer purchase.

A Personal Computer History (2) : Mighty Micros

So we've been playing some games (mostly Pong derivatives), its time for a real computer. Time to begin coding and harness the raw power of the microprocessor.

So in 1980 my Dad bought a Sinclair ZX-80. Compared to computers nowadays it's specifications seem rather primitive: a Z80 CPU running at 3.5 MHz, 1 KB of RAM and programs had to be loaded and saved to cassette tape. (In comparison i'm writing this blogpost on an ageing Macbook with a 2.5 GHz CPU and 4 GB of RAM so things have moved on a bit in the last few years.)

The ZX-80 was fun, though typing in programs could be a bit of a chore with the membrane keyboard and the somewhat unwieldy way to edit text. I did type in all of the Cheese Nibbler program however which was in the book shown below. Quite a basic little game, just a load of PRINT statements really but enjoyable.

Little did i know back then (i was still at primary school of course) that i would spent my university and working career working with computers, writing programs in Pascal, Visual BASIC and finally Perl and later web sites and e-learning hacking CSS and Javascript to extend Captivate.

Anyway after the ZX-80 we progressed to a Commodore VIC-20 which had colour output and cartridges for loading games and other software. To be honest i mostly used it to play games. After that a BBC Micro Model B which we eventually obtained a printer and a floppy disc drive (5.25" of course) for. This was a more serious computer and i did write some basic BASIC programs on it... and play some games. But it all started with the little ZX-80, which i still have and in theory it still works...

A Personal Computer History (1) : Introduction to the 8-bit world

In this new series i will talk and reminisce about my adventures with computers. Mostly in the olden days but we will briefly touch upon the present day. Lets start in the late 1970s when the world was getting turned onto the microcomputer world.

Like many people my introduction to computers was via video games. I was bought a pong system in the late 1970s by my parents and delighted in hitting little blocks on the screen with slightly bigger blocks. My system was a Grandstand 3600 and had a number of games including squash and hockey though they were all slight variations of the classic pong set-up. There were also a couple of target shooting games which used a light sensor in a pistol to tell if you were firing at the block moving across the screen or not. It did work pretty well and indeed the system itself was fine.

I still have it safely stored away in the loft hough have not used it properly for many years. The gun has long gone (i found playing with it as a "normal" toy gun more fun to be honest and eventually it was destroyed) but both paddle controllers still exist.

Genesis of my videogame history

In the box

I've never been that much of a gamer to be honest though still enjoy some bit bashing now and then. The Grandstand did work the last time i tried it though the video signal was a bit fragile.

A bit later i also had a couple of hand-held video game toys including an Astro Wars which i have also still got and a tiny LCD game my cousin bought me in Hong Kong. I don't have that anymore but it involved flipping pancakes. One console i didn't have but i always wished i did was an Atari 2600. I finally bought one on eBay in the late 1990s. Its lying unused in the loft too though!

However fun as they were the time for games was over, it was time to get an actual microcomputer... and play games on one of those instead! To be continued...