Computers in my life

For a very long time now, computers have been a part of my life. Over the years, I've tinkered with a lot of different kinds. I'm not quite sure what was the first computer I got in contact with, though. Either way, this must have happened in the earliest years of the 1980s. My father studied at the university of Linköping then and I know I was there playing some game on the mainframe there, using a paper teletype. At approximately the same time, school sent everyone out into Real Life(TM) for a week and I used a computer at the company I was sent to (I think it was ASEA, now ABB) to play some games. I also got my first programmable calculator, a Texas Instruments TI-57, now.

During grade 8 or 9 I got in contact with the ABC80 computers they had in a back room in the physics department and did some tinkering with the games there, trying to modify them. I also did some very simple programs of my own.

Around 1983, computers were starting to appear in the homes of my friends. One friend got a ZX81 and he and I started to try to program that. He didn't have any memory extension, so we had to cram everything into 1K, including the screen memory. You can't do very much that way, I can tell you. Another friend had a VIC-20 but I never played much with that.

Of course I wanted my own computer. I spent lots of time going around all the shops in town that had computers for sale (and at this time, there were a lot of them). I know I looked at ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, TI-99/4A, Atari 400 and 800 and probably others, but finally I decided that I wanted a Commodore 64. Sometime in 1983 I bought myself a Commodore 64 with a tape drive and started to learn how to use it. I hooked it up to an enormous black-and-white television and did some BASIC and some attempts at assembler.

Pretty soon I started buying lots of computer magazines (both Swedish and foreign) and started to get into the cracking scene. I started to exchange program with lots of people (although I don't remember the names of almost any of them nowadays). I also tried to learn to crack games myself but I never got very good at it. I did create some useable programs for myself, though. One of the most finished ones was a database that kept track of all the programs I had and a text adventure game. A year or so later I had gotten enough money to get myself a 1541 disk drive and things was much nicer after that. Now it only took a couple of minutes to load a game... Apart from all this, I also did quite a lot of word processing on the trusty old C64. Unfortunately, I didn't keep the disks when I sold the machine.

In the fall of 1983 I went to a new school which had a computer program. We didn't really start using the computers until the second year (come to think of it, we didn't even have the computers until the second year). What we got then was the newly constructed, totally amazing made-in-Sweden school computer Compis. We got some of the very first machines, I think. We did not get any documentation until the second year we had them. Oh well. The first year we had to program in COMAL which was some kind of souped-up BASIC. The year after we got the then-new Pascal compiler and life got a bit better.

In 1985 or 1986, a friend and I were supposed to write a report about computers and computer security for a class. Since he had access to the university computers we used them. This was the first time I got in contact with Unix and Emacs (although the version on this machine was called SCAME). We finally produced a 40-some-pages report writtin the formatting language AFORM. Haven't heard of that? Can't really blame you. It's not entirely unlike troff. The only program I finished in the Compis (apart from school projects) was a text adventure, I think.

Now, those of my friends who had computers tended to have Amigas. I never got one of those for some reason. I don't remember why anymore, but for some reason I got myself an Atari ST with a monochrome monitor and a dot-matrix printer instead. After using that for a little while I discovered that I didn't like the fact that it was integrated so that the computer, disk drive and keyboard was all in the same box. Pretty soon, the computer went to live in a very ugly wooden box with lots of wires coming out of it, while the keyboard went into another (just as ugly) wooden case. This way, I could keep the keyboard in my lap and type. The design didn't exactly win any prices but at least it did work. I never really got down to trying to program the Atari, but I know I messed around trying to create a small program that loaded on boot that should remap the keyboard for me. I'm not sure if it ever worked the way I wanted. Mostly, this machine was used as a word processor.

When the Atari began to feel cramped I once again started to look out for something else. At this point I had begun working part-time at a place that sold Macintoshes. First I toyed with the idea to buy a Macintosh emulation kit for the Atari, but fortunately nothing ever came of that. Instead I got a Macintosh Classic with 4MB memory (which was as much as you could cram into the machine). Pretty soon I also got a HP DeskWriter inkjet printer for it. The Mac was used for lots of things: word processing, games, genealogy, programming, etc. I didn't finish anything on the Mac either, really, but I did fiddle with it quite a lot. The hack I tinkered with the most was probably the Emacs-like editor that I started to work on, specifically to be able to edit files on an old VT100 terminal connected to the serial port at the same time as someone else was using the Mac for something else. It got to the stage where it was possible to enter simple texts, but the editing facilities were incredibly basic.

After having the Mac for a couple of years I bought a second-hand "portable" DOS machine. It was a 286/20 with all of 1MB memory IIRC and ran MS-DOS 4.01 (it had Windows 3.1 installed as well but I never used that). This wasn't much of an improvement from the Mac (rather the opposite in most senses). However, with this machine I could use Perl scripts copied from a friend. Because of this, I started to learn Perl and SGML to keep track of my book database and some other things. Actually running the Perl scripts to process the book database (at that time containing slightly more than 1000 volumes) took several minutes.

Around this time I started to look into Linux. I had been around people using it for a while but never tried myself, primarily due to lack of suitable hardware. Sometime during 1995 I borrowed a 386/SX16 with 4MB RAM and installed the then-current version of Slackware Linux on it from a tower of diskettes. I didn't really use this machine for anything useful (it was hardly possible - it would swap itself to death as soon as you even considered running gcc) but I did learn a bit about Linux.

In late 1995 I bought a new PC, my first (a 486/120 (from AMD) with 16MB RAM). I installed Red Hat Linux 4.2 on this and it was used as an allround writing and programming machine for about three years until it started to feel too slow. It is still in active duty as playstation for the children and scanner workstation (since there are no Linux drivers for my scanner).

Sometime 1998 I began renting a Pentium II/333 with 64 MB from my then employer, IFS. It ran Red Hat 5.1 (I think it was) for a year and a half or so before I had to return it since I stopped working at IFS.

The next (and current) machine was a 650MHz machine from AMD with 128MB. This time it runs Red Hat 6.2 with Helix Gnome on top of it. Very nice environment, I think, even if it happily eats most of the memory increase from 64 to 128MB. The Linux boxes have seen some programming. In mid-2002, this machine broke down and got a new motherboard and processor, so now it is a 1GHz Duron. A while before that, memory was increased to 384MB. Also, it now runs Red Hat 7.1.

Nowadays (since late 1999) I also carry a computer with me everywhere. I got myself a Palm Pilot IIIx and am very satisfied with it. Always having my notes in order, my addresses up-to-date and a couple of novels in my pocket was a very nice experience indeed. I haven't tried to program the little thing yet, but I'm a bit tempted.


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