More about me - Computer History
The first computer that I got my hands on was the Spectra Video Home Computer. I hadn't even turned ten at that time. The machine wasn't actually mine but a neighbour's. I borrowed it for more than a year (shame on me :) It had some great games like roboman and a hot air balloon game. Only you had to type in the games everytime before playing them since the machine didn't have a cassette player. Thank god my dad was patient enough to type in the games every once in a while. Power cuts were a real pain in the ass at that time.
The Commodore 64 was my next machine. It was a remarkable computer. Games like Commando, The Last Ninja, Paper Boy, Double Dragon, Ghostbusters, Sanxion, Spy vs Spy, Summer Games, Winter Games, BoulderDash, After Burner, Cybernoid, Batman, Mission Impossible, Saboteur and many others will never be forgotten by me. Particularly I recall fondly of the music of C-64 games. I still like to listen to those tunes every once in a while and call to mind the good ol' days when everything was new and miraculous. I'll never forget the background music in the game Druid. You can download a remix by Instant Remedy.
At some point I got myself the Amiga 500. Graphics were sharp and the colours dazzling. You could use actual samples in the music. The loading times of games were stupendously short compared to the C-64 loading marathons.
Later I got myself an Amiga 1200 with an 80MB hard drive. Now working with the computer was very pleasent. All sort of tweaking of the computer and collecting of PD (Public Domain) programs became a hobby of mine. I even upgraded my machine to a 68030 50MHz with 10 MB of memory. I also added a 2xCD-ROM Drive and a 1GB hard drive.
At that time I still had time to play games. Here's a list of some that come to mind: Faerytale, Outrun, Buggy boy, Monkey Island, Chaos Engine, Settlers, Duck Tales, Cannon Fodder, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Zool, Leaderboard, Might and Magic, Risk, Super Off Road, Gravity Wars, Test Drive, Super Frog, Sensible Soccer, Hero's Quest, Pinball games, Deluxe Galaga, Larry 1 and 3, Prince of Persia, Battle Chess, Bug Bomber, Scorched Earth type games, Tron, Tetris, Boulder Dash games, Dyna Blaster, Roketz, Lotus 1-3, No Mans Land, First Samurai, Storm Swiv, Pacman, Gianna Sisters, Ports of Call, Syndicate, Lemmings, Tetris, Budokan, IK+, Civization, Elite, 3D-Pool, Shadow of the Beast, Knights, Capital Punishment, Turrican, Skid Marks, Speedball II, Onslaught, Stunt Car Racer, Another World and Worms.
On a darker note I also remember the numerous viruses that the Amiga had, like Saddam, Lamer Exterminator and Butonic, as well as the legendary scourge and a daily cause of irritation the Guru Meditation.
Some of my warmer memories are connected to Octamed, Deluxe Paint, Vista, Imagine, Trackers and the most vast collection of Public Domain programs any computer has had.
As you might guess I was quite a devoted Amiga freek at that time. After all it was Amiga that trained a guru out of me. I tried to stay faithful to the Amiga until the very end but ultimately I rid myself of the obsession and converted wholly to the PC party.
My first PC had a 286 processor, followed by 386 14MHz, 486 DX2 66MHz, Intel Pentium 133MHz, AMD K6 300MHz with a PowerVR card, AMD K6-2 500MHz with 3dfx Voodoo 2, AMD TB 1.4GHz with Nvidia Geforce2 MX, Intel P4 2.4GHz with Ati 9800 Pro, Lenovo T60 laptop with Ati Radeon X1400, Intel Core 2 Quad with Ati Radeon 4870, and a minilaptop by Samsung.
Nowadays I use both Windows and Linux as my operating systems. I've used Red Hat and Fedora but at the moment I have Ubuntu set up on my desktop, and Jolicloud on the minilaptop. My preferred browser is Google Chrome and my favourite tool is emacs.