IBM PC 25th Birthday & My History With Computers

It was actually yesterday but I never got around to writing about it. I just read an article on Engadget where the editors had posted their first experiences with PCs. It made me realise that mine were actually earlier than many of theirs.

Before I actually used an IBM compatible PC, I already had experience of computers. My earliest memories where of the Commodore Vic 20 my dad bought for my sister although I can never remember her playing on it only him, then me. I can remember my dad sitting there for hours with a neighbour having typed in a all the code to write a game and my mother switched the wrong plug off and lost the lot. No disks then, you had to save to tapes. The main game I can remember playing on the Vic 20 was Blitz, it was so simple, but I used to love playing it. All I ever did on that computer was play games but I was very young.

After the VIC 20, my dad bought my sister an Amstrad CPC6128, yet again it was my dad that used it, then me. He wrote several simple programs in BASIC and even wrote the Blitz game I had played on the Vic 20. We had loads of extras, like an extra 256k of memory. It used 3" disks, the only computer I've known to use them. I was still very young when we got this, about 7 or maybe 8. Not long after my dad bought an Amstrad 80286, our first PC. It came with an 8Mhz processor, 640K RAM and a 30MB Hard Drive and windows 2 I think and DOS 3.3.

I was given the Amstrad CPC6128 when my dad got this and I used to play games and started to write simple programs in BASIC on it to record car speeds and o-60 times stuff like that. I guess even then I used to create lists of pointless stuff and collect things on the computer.

My dad had the 2086 for a lot of years and he wrote several programs on it in GW BASIC some are still in use today for the company he worked for at the time. I got more into using the the PC rather than my CPC. I taught myself how to navigate around DOS and wrote very simple programs. I can remember playing Duke Nukem which was a side scrolling action game compared to the 3D shootem up versions of Duke Nukem now. I think I played that in about 91/92.

Sometime around about 93 a friend of my dads needed a new computer because something had happened to his 2086, it could of been stolen and think he ended up with the insurance money. My dad had set his original computer up for him, with programs he had wrote for his friends business. So we ended up with the new computer at our house so my dad could get the programs working for him. Of course this was different to the old 2086 this came with Windows 3.1 which compared to version 2 was a revelation to me. I had been into the old Windows a couple of times and thought it rubbish so never used it. Now here is Windows 3.1 working well and it seamed excellent. Around about this time we went to a computer show in Alexander Palace in London to get a printer for the new computer. We bought a Citizen Swift Dot Matrix which was colour. While I was at the show I saw something that totally stopped me in my tracks. It was Doom, it was like no game I had ever seen before.

Shortly after this my dad decided he needed a new PC, he bought a Mitac 486 SX 33 I think it was. It was from here that got us even more hooked on computers. We bought a CD drive for it and an 8 bit Sound Blaster card from a computer show in Birmingham I think it was. It cost about £160-£180 for them in a bundle. The CD drive was only 2X then.

We spent most of our time on the computer, whenever my dad wasn't in I would try to get on the computer. I was 14 at the time. In December of 1994 I finally managed to persaude my dad to go onto the internet. We joined up with Compuserve which was later swallowed up by AOL. At the time there was only a handful od ISPs. We bought a US Robotics 14.4 modem which cost £120, 28.8 was out but they cost £200+. I had been trying to get a modem back in the late eighties for my 6128 but my parents wouldn't let me probably because of War Games. Anyway the World Wide Web wasn't very exciting back then, I can remember going to Cardiff Internet Movies Database (now IMDB), NASA and a few other sites that are still around today. I can remember waiting over 10 minutes for a picture of Mars or Saturn to load up and giving up. The browser we used then was NCSA Mosaic. The first few months on the internet we used to go to Bulletin Boards that you dialled up to rather than the internet as such. I did use some of Compuserves forums. It was in 95 when I started using the World Wide Web all the time and wrote my own web pages in HTML. How the internet has changed since then.

Sometime around 95 or there abouts after my dad had upgraded the PC lots, he bought a new one. I can't remember if he bought this from Tiny or if he had another before the PC from Tiny.

In about July/August 95 I worked very briefly 1 day a week for Nectar computers on a Youth Training placement. This gave me an insight into just how easy it really was to build a computer totally from scratch. We had already upgraded processors, RAM, CD drives, etc.. at home but never built a computer from scratch. It wasn't until March 97 when I had a full time job of my own that I could afford to buy the parts and build my own computer. I can't remember entirely what spec I built at the time as I have upgraded so many comptuers since then. I think I originally built a P133 with 32MB RAM and 40GB hard drive. Up until this point I had always had to use my dads computers. I already spent a lot of time on the computer but now with my own PC in my bedroom I could spend all night and regularly did.

There is no point in explaining any newer computers as I have built quite a few. I now have over 10 around the house. None are of the latest spec because I no longer play games on the PC or even on a console, so I have no need for the highest spec computer. I still enjoy trying to keep up with the latest things to come out and try anything I can out.

Its interesting to look back and remember how interested I have been in computers and how much they have captivated my imagination over the years, they still do. Maybe this was a good idea to look back at my computer history. There was so much more I could of gone into but it would end of the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica.