exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

It occurred to me it'd be interesting to delve into peoples history with computers, and how did you end up doing what you're doing now.

I'll kick off :)

My original experiences started off with a ZX81 and later a Spectrum plus Aquarius, Atari 600 XL, then 800XL, followed by ST's and an Amiga, before finally getting into PCs with an IBM PC, which got an upgrade to a 386sx before finally getting a 486 from Time Computers (Anybody in the UK remember them?) Computer upgrades are a bit of a blur after that because there were so many incremental changes that it all got a bit boring!!

I did have exposure to an Apple ][ at school, and later BBCs, plus I had a friend with a TRS80 and friends with C64s, Vic20s and Dragon 32s.

I just remember it as an amazing time in those early days, with so many different machines like the Enterprise 64, Jupiter Ace, Grundy Newbrain, Orics etc, how could you possible settle on any one machine!!

What's funny for me is that it was always a hobby, and I spent a large chunk of my working life doing mechanical engineering before finally settling on computing, where I now work as a site reliability engineer.

So where did you start? What string of machines took you from where you where then to where you are now?

Atari 2600 with 4 games. Though I got so good at pole position , it wasn't what score I could get, but how many times I could loop back to zero.after 3 or 4 loops.. It became a bit pointless. I wanted to write my own games at the time.

Some school mates had other machines. One guy had a spectrum, used to take a couple hours to get a game to load. Liked the machine but tapes were just annoying.

A guy had a C64, great sound for the time, but got annoyed following the manual to create a sprite which was a hot air balloon which was corrupted.

One had a Amiga 500. While graphics and sound were generally good, I just couldnt "get into it".

At school there was mostly old BBC machines which just seemed annoying and slow. I dont think i ever won suburban fox :( We had a 286 PC at some point. Used to play micromachines during registration :lol: but never really liked the PC. Plus those RM nimbus machines and the smile menu, a bit of fun, but always seemed limited in what they could do.

During computer classes we used to have to do stuff with turtle / logo or whatever its called. Used to take 5 seconds to do the exercise. So what's a bored kid supposed to do for 2 hours... More effects, more colours, more getting told off not doing the exercises :roll: I found a security hole in the school network which another kid took credit for :roll:

In the end I saved like mad for a Atari ST discovery pack, floppy drive, so no tapes. A "good" selection of games and also came with many utils and STOS. STOS is where I started out but often I got annoyed at the lack of capacity of 720k floppies. I used extended formats for a long time.

At some point I got a TUS 1.44 floppy kit, which as a poor school kid wasn't easy to buy. But I was never convinced it worked right. But mostly I got annoyed of having to load the driver from floppy all the time., I needed a better solution...the rest is history as they say.

Some years passed and I saved up for a falcon when I started fulltime work and could actually afford one!

Edit:
Forgot to mention I did have a PC as well :lol: was a 286sx25 IIRC. DOS machine. Built mostly from "junk" from the guys I used to work with. Playing doom for hours each night was great. Hunting for the matrox graphics cards and dealing with IRQ conflicts and the rest :lol:

Mostly I wanted to run easypc PCB software as it was what we used during my technical training days. We etched our own boards and printed with a plotter. Later I wanted to get online so a bought a cheap PC from a guy from work with win3.11 on it to get on the internet. It didn't last long, and win95 was put on it not long after. Which lead me into the BSOD years :lol: :roll:

exxos wrote: 30 Jan 2022 16:17 One had a Amiga 500. While graphics and sound were generally good, I just couldnt "get into it".

Use a bolster chisel.

cmorley wrote: 30 Jan 2022 16:33

exxos wrote: 30 Jan 2022 16:17 One had a Amiga 500. While graphics and sound were generally good, I just couldnt "get into it".

Use a bolster chisel.

:lol:

I started with an Atari 800XL in 1982. Stayed with the 8bit line up until
late 1985 when I got my first Atari 520ST and never looked back. :)

cmorley wrote: 30 Jan 2022 16:33

exxos wrote: 30 Jan 2022 16:17 One had a Amiga 500. While graphics and sound were generally good, I just couldnt "get into it".

Use a bolster chisel.

:bravo: :lolbig:

I was exposed to computer at school with the Thomson MO5 working in a "nano-network" ; a big main unit with a floppy drive serving the MO5 units. Using the "LOGO" language to move a turtle and do drawings, then in middle school messing around with the basic.

In late middle school, I wanted an Amiga 500, but my father decided on an Atari STe, for the MIDI capabilities.

After entering an engineering school, I got a PC, mainly on windows. It took time to go Linux full time, mainly after carefully selecting compatible hardware.

- Apple II clone
- then switch to ATARI ST
- Mega ST
- TT (two of them actually; the first TT - the one which ran only @ 16 MHz didn't survive being used 24/7 and was returned; the revised 32 MHz model still works...)
- Falcon
- Mac Quadra AV
- Mac Powerbook 190
- Win 95 Pentium 90
- Mac PowerPC 8500
- Win NT P5 233
- PowerMac G3
- Win NT AMD Duron
- Powerbook G4 Titanium
- PowerMac G4
- PowerMac G5
- Apple MacBook
- Win XP AMD XP
- MacPro 2007
- MacPro 2010
- Macbook Pro 2013
- Win7 Intel 4770
- Win10 Intel 7700K
- MacBook Pro 2016
- Win10 AMD Ryzen
- Macbook Pro 2019
- Raspberry Pi 4
- Win10 AMD Threadripper2
- Apple M1 mini
- Win11 Notebook Intel 12900K

It started with a Apple II clone, because at the time looking for my first machine, the Spectrum and the C64 got a massive price hike close to the clone price, the Spectrum had a rubbish keyboard and the school used Apple II's...

The ATARI ST was my entry into being a professional programmer; these days constantly switching between macOS & Windows (and occasionally Linux if I have to), pushing pixels.

I swapped a crappy little Casio keyboard for a VIC20 that was gathering dust at my friend's house, must've been about 1983 or 84. I fussed around with it for a while, nothing fancy, mainly playing the cartridge based games, Omega Race, Jelly Monsters etc.

That gathered dust for a bit until I saw my 'rich' mate's speccy AND c64. I enjoyed a lot of the games on the speccy but that weird keyboard system did my nut in, I much preferred being able to free type on the 64, so I pestered my parents for an age and managed to snag a C128 one Christmas when they'd just been released. I think my dad was feeling flush at the time.

Absorbed everything I could find in terms of listings, the Rom Kernel Manual, etc and me and a mate started to 'crack' some games, mainly transferring multi load tape games to disk, he had a 1541 and I had saved up some job money & got a 1571 for a birthday.

Then the Amiga came out and I remember lusting after an A1000, but there was simply no chance of ever getting one. The A500 appeared and my dad was working his way up at work, so I ended up with an Amiga one Christmas (I had to sell the 128 & 1571 to partially fund it), I'm not exactly sure what year that was but the Amiga ended up with me in Sheffield while I did a degree in "Information Technology" at the Poly.

That was a really great course, we got access to lots of cool gear, storage scopes, Apollo work stations, zeek boards, PLC's, Transputers, and a lot of 386s & 486s.

My younger brother got an A1200 which I lusted after for a bit, but my dad's work were upgrading there machines in ~ 1996 and I inherited a 486 DX2 66 and I pretty much stayed on x86 from then until a year ago when I picked up an A500, A600, and a couple of c64's. I've always been a bit on the geeky side though and ran various linux and bsd systems at home, I got some code in the linux kernel at one point - a patch for the Amiga Fast File System which had been written assuming it would only ever be executed on m68k processors - I just added an endianness check so it would also work on the PC. I used that to mount the HDD from my brothers A1200 which had died and copy a load of games off to use in an emulator. It still makes me shiver when I recall throwing his A1200 in the bin, if only I'd known how they'd have grown in value. I think it was probably only a power issue too.

My 8 bit time gave me a fantastic grounding for my career - which has been in IT surprise surprise.

I did have a mate with an ST, but there never really seemed to be the same game coverage as the Amiga had, and that awful green desktop always put me off (I know I may get shot for that here!).

My journey is very similar to yours.

ZX81 at Christmas 1981 with the 16K RAM Pack arriving for my birthday the following February.
ZX Spectrum 16K in about March 83, upgraded to 48K in the late Summer (Fox Electronics) by selling the ZX81 to one of my Dad's work colleagues (bought it back a couple of years later for £15). Interface 1, Microdrive and a Brother HR-5 printer during the Summer of '84.
Memotech MTX500 December 1984, using the left overs from my first term's university grant money.
Sinclair QL in January 1986, Trump Card and flopy disks in the Summer of 87.
2nd Hand BBC Micro January 88, with a new Cumana disk drive, so as to play Elite.
Atari 520STM + SF-314 floppy drive Summer 88. (Memory upgrade Summer 89, Third Coast Technologies hard drive 1990).
Atari TT Summer 91.
2nd hand Sun 3/80 1993.
First PC (386SX, mainly 2nd hand) 1994 sometime.

After that it's mostly been rescuing "retro" machines from the work junk pile with a few eBay purchases since the mid noughties.