During my childhood and school years I have had what could best be called 'intermittent' contact with computers. I remember years and years ago, probably the late seventies, visiting friends of my father's who must have had some sort of access to a mainframe system.They had used it to print out a picture of a naked woman. The print was primitive and used the text characters from some sort of daisy-wheel or line printer and you had to look hard to see the naked lady but, noetheless, she was there.
I did computing for 1 year in my 3rd form of high school where I learnt to program in BASIC on Sinclair ZX-81's. In my spare time after school I would ride my pushbike down to the local KMart and type programs, that I had written during the day, into the Sinclair Spectrums they had on sale there. What wonders! Spectrums had COLOUR!!!!
I barely touched computers again until I joined the Police in 1990 where I was taught how to use the department's Vehicle, Offence Reporting (OIS) and Names information systems. This rekindled my interest in computers and I bought my first computer as soon as I had made enough money in my new job. It was a Commodore Amiga A500 with 512Kb of RAM and single 880Kb floppy disk drive. When I finally sold it it had 2Mb of RAM and a 52Mb Roctec SCSI external hard drive.
Thinking back to when I first bought my Amiga I now realise that I had little concept of what a computer even was. The Police department's main frame was text based terminals, the ZX-81's I used were little passed text based and, although the games were graphics, my friend's Commodore 64, that I used to play with, was also largely text based. Imagine my surprise upon finally 'booting' (whatever that meant) my Amiga. The screen had pictures on it and there wasn't anywhere to type in commands. How did this thing work?!?! I didn't know but I was overjoyed to finally have my own computer to blow up if I chose to do so. It didn't matter if I did something wrong on this thing. If I did I had noone to blame but myself. I believe this was the attitude that enabled me to learn so much about this tiny box with nothing more than a manual or two and the monthly installments of CU Amiga and Amiga Format magazines. I used to read then cover to cover and couldn't learn enough about this machine that I grew to love.
Only years later did I find out that 'Amiga' is the spanish for 'girlfriend'...
Nowadays we take WIMP based GUIs and multitasking, full colour, stereo sound, multimedia PCs for granted and back then, so did Amiga owners.
Here is a screenshot of my entire Amiga filesystem copied to a directory on my Windows NT Pentium II 266MHz, 64Mb, 6.5Gb PC (yuk!) while it futiley attempts to emulate it's 14MHz processor and fully pre-emptive multitasking operating system (not that WinUAE isn't a terrific program).
I still have an Amiga. It's an A1200 with 10Mb and 1.2Gb of disk, an external High Density floppy drive that reads Mac, PC and amiga disks and a parallel cable network that connects it to my PC and allows me to use all (including network) of the PC's drives as though they were just another part of the Amiga's filesystem. I don't use it for much except for when I want to run one of my favourite demos (like Spaceballs' 'State Of The Art') or maybe play a classic game or two, like 'Llamatron'
Currently I'm in the middle of rebuilding it after buying a second hand 1.2Gb drive for it. Sadly, I'll probably never finish the task but I'll never sell it either. I still wish that I had that old A500. I spent nearly $3,000 on it and was lucky yo get $500 for it when I sold it a couple of years later. Worse still, I gave away some of my favourite games thinking that they wouldn't run on my A1200, only to find that, since then, enthusiastic programmers have hacked these old games to not only run on my A1200 but also be installed to hard disk.
Spewing...
| Commodore fans: | |
| Wintel/MacOS/Unix/Linux/BeOS fans: | 
|