Date: 2011-03-09 21:15:31 Created: null
Or: the computer nostalgia page
Once upon a time, on a day long lost in the shrouds of the past, I played my first computer game. That probably was my first experience with computers altogether too, I may perhaps have seen someone play computer games before that. The prime suspect is Niklas Källgren, previous classmate, and his/his brother's Commodore 128. Boulder Dash may well have been the mysterious First Game, other possible candidates are Bubble Bobble and Transformers. Casseste tapes were the norm by which the 5½ inch disks were judged lightning-fast. Petter got a C-64 of his own too, when his father discovered that the PC was a more popular "work-computer". Games took long to load, were simple and generally below par by today's standards. On the other hand, no-one had even dreamt of today's standards back then. Not of today's hardware upgrading craze either for that matter ... The SID chip produced some really great tunes which simply won't sound as good in any other format. Bubble Bobble and Commando are just two examples, nothing except SID emulation do them justice. Finally, I got one too, and was able to spend eternities waiting for loading from cassette to fail ...
I can't say for sure if this one should go before or after the C-64 to be in chronological order. Anyway, it wasn't really ours, and we didn't keep it for all that long. It was a portable, by that time's standards, PC with a monochrome screen, PC speaker sound and perhaps even a mouse. My father got it from his job, probably to do work type of things on. That's irrelevant in this case. What we remember it for around here is Digger. Simple, fast and fun, and the sounds still rank among the best things I've heard from a PC speaker. It had another game or two, Othello was one of them (and the computer spent ages thinking on the higher difficulty levels), as well as some primitive and limited form of GUI (it might even have been some version of Windows ...). Any other facts remain shrouded in mystery ...
| Tech Info: C-64 |
| MOS 8510 Microprocessor (about 1MHz) |
| 20 K ROM |
| 64 K RAM, 38 K user available in BASIC |
| 320 by 200 pixels resolution, 16 colours |
| Commodore BASIC 2.0 |
| Cassette tapes for data storage |
Not sure which year I got it, 1988 is a qualified guess, but it was for Christmas and I had chickenpox. Along with it I got Batman: The Movie and a strange joystick called the Navigator, which gave you sores. Nevertheless, it didn't stop me from playing games. I even tried, a few short attempts I admit, to learn BASIC.
| Tech Info: Amiga 500 Plus |
| Motorola 68000 16 bit processor (7,09 MHz) |
| 1 Mb RAM (expanded to 1,5 Mb) |
| 512 K ROM |
| 320 by 200 to 1280 by 256 pixels resolution |
| Up to 4096 colours |
| Amiga DOS 2.04 |
| Floppy disks for data storage |
The wonderful Amiga 500 started sneaking its way into my friend's homes not long, a year or two perhaps, after the C-64s had settled down and made themselves comfortable. With 0,5 Mb of RAM, up to 4096 colours and four channel stereo sound and, also very important, the blazing load speeds of the internal floppy disk drive, it blew poor 64 away. It still blows a lot of things around, especially when compared to PCs. For example, Plug 'n' Play was taken for granted, and you never had to fiddle for hours to free up memory. Games were plenty of course, and some of them are still as great. No sport game on any PC can beat the pure, furious energy of Speedball II on a TV (it's the only two player game ever to put steam on my bedroom window ...). No football game can compete with the playability of Sensible Soccer. And, as I've said before, the Wing Commander theme sounds better in mod than any other format or version. Oh, did I mention it did voice synthesis too?
| Tech Info: LC II |
| Motorola 68030 32 bit processor (15,6672 MHz) |
| 4 Mb RAM |
| 512 K ROM |
| 320 by 200 to 1280 by 256 pixels resolution |
| Up to 256 colours |
| System 7 |
| Disk and hard drives (69,6 Mb) for data storage |
Our first, and only, Mac. Probably the computer intended for work on which the most actual work has been done, the main reason being we didn't have a lot of games for it. The game I've played most on it is probably Civilization, it both looked better and loaded faster, being on a hard drive, than the Amiga version. I kind of like the sound of that hard drive too ...
The Mac's in my possession nowadays. It's sitting around on the floor in my room in the company of two Amiga joysticks, looking quite happy with life even though it doesn't see much use these days. I want to put it to use somehow, but I can't quite figure out for what or how ...
| Tech Info: P133 |
| Intel Pentium processor (133 MHz) |
| 32 Mb RAM |
| 1 Mb Video RAM (expanded to 2, then 4 Mb) |
| Up to 1280 by 1024 pixels resolution |
| Up to 32 bit colour |
| Windows 95 (later 98) |
| Disk and hard drives (1,2 Gb) for data storage |
The autumn of 1995 saw the first PC enter our house, and the internet with it. The hardware craze was about to reach us ... For a while, it felt new and powerful, but not for all that long. Soon, state of the art games made it stutter and choke nervously, and the once astronomical 1,2 Gb harddrive got more and more claustrophobic. It was kind of fun to drop a Voodoo2 board in this machine. Everything started to look tremendous, but moved quite slow at times because the processor couldn't catch up with the 3d card. When you increased screen resolution to what used to be killing levels, Voody just ignored it and preserved the pace, which was severely limited by the processor. Fortunately, a faster computer was on its way ...
| Tech Info: PII 450 |
| Intel Pentium II processor (450 MHz) |
| 128 Mb RAM |
| 8 Mb Video RAM |
| 12 Mb Voodoo2 board |
| Up to 1600 by 1200 pixels resolution |
| Up to 32 bit colour |
| Windows 98 |
| Disk and hard drives (9,4 Gb) for data storage |
About three years after getting the P133, my father purchased this computer, which laughed at the collected computing power of the house's older computers. 3d game framerates took a quantum leap when I threw in the Voodoo2 (rather cool, those raised 2s ...), finally there was a processor which could keep up with it. You knew some additional power was available when Mp3 music could be played at the same time as Ignition without notable slowdown. Hell, it's even able to emulate a 14 Mhz Amiga pretty good ...
| Tech Info: PIII 700 |
| Intel Pentium III processor (700 MHz) |
| 128 Mb RAM (now upgraded to 384) |
| 32 Mb Video RAM (GeForce chip) |
| Up to 1600 by 1024 pixels resolution |
| Up to 32 bit colour |
| Windows 98, XP, BeOS, Red Hat Linux |
| Disk, hard drives (15 Gb, now 75) |
| and CD burner for data storage |
On August 1, 2000 I walked into local computer store Sekvencia, meaning to ask a bit about the cost of adding certain parts to a computer package of theirs. The next day I was there again to pick up my new computer. Buying stuff is too easy ...
There's been some upgrades since the original purchase ... February 15 2001 the amount of memory suddenly tripled and on July 5 the hard drive space went from a slightly crowded 15 Gb to a seemingly bottomless 75 Gb due to strategic investments during a certain excursion to Asia ...
And today Terminus is officially retired. With a Mac able to run Windows many times faster and nicer there was very litte need to keep Terminus around the apartment anymore. It might come back if I suddenly think of a use for it, but until then it's in retirement, its hard drives (still the originals - not a single failure!) removed and within reach if needed.
| Tech Info: Duron 750 |
| AMD Duron processor |
| (750 MHz, overclocked to 866 MHz, then down to 750 MHz again) |
| 512 Mb RAM |
| 32 Mb Video RAM (TNT2 chip that fried, now GeForce) |
| Up to 32 bit colour |
| Mandrake, Windows XP (previously Windows 98, Debian) |
| Disk and hard drives (40 GB) for storage |
On December 26 2001, I spotted this one up for sale at Blocket (see external at top of page). I'd wanted a second computer to play around with for some time and looked at several others (with much lower specs and prices) at the same site offering even less than the asking prices, but for this one I felt no need to barter, just a little worry that this wasn't the right thing to spend money on right now :-) ... After a few hours of wandering back and forth and hesitating I finally got myself together and picked up the phone. The next day at 14:00 I was back home and a happy owner of a second PC outperforming my first one.
Alas, no happiness lasts forever. Between the day after the purchase and a month or more later there was nothing but trouble. The next morning it wouldn't start, the screen would remain black and it would even turn itself off after a while. Help was enlisted from all corners of the friend sphere but nothing seemed to help. Surely it couldn't be because of the blue stuff around that thing down on the motherboard? After a while I gave up and handed the computer in for error searching at the place the processor was bought. Had it been the processor I would have got it for free. Now it wasn't, it really was that blue stuff that had killed the motherboard, and taken the graphics card with it to boot. Turned out I'd almost killed the processor when removing/remounting the fan as well. Hearing things like "Normally when a Duron looks like this it's dead, but this one still works. Be very careful when putting it back in." doesn't exactly make you feel better about mounting it again later on ... Plus I had to pay for the error searching of course ...
Because of all the down feeling, and a good flow of other things to do, it took a while before I got around to sending the motherboard back, but when I finally did I soon got a new one without any trouble. A new graphics card, incidentally Martin's GeForce exactly the same as the one in this computer, was installed, and we've lived happily ever after.
So far, that is ...
And of course the OS has changed too. Now there's XP and Debian in there, and a happy penguin doll on top of the monitor. The overclocking has gone too, just to be on the safe side ...
| Tech Info: PowerBook |
| Motorola G4 processor (867 MHz) |
| 640 Mb RAM |
| 32 Mb Video RAM |
| 1024 by 768 pixels resolution |
| Up to 32 bit colour |
| OS X 10.2 (now 10.3) |
| CD-RW/DVD-R and hard drive (40 Gb) for data storage |
Strange things happened as 2003 headed into the serious spring stage. Momentum slowly built, and finally I caved in unde the pressure and got myself my first laptop, first Mac and first wirelessly networked computer in one compact package. More info, a lot more, can be had in the Mac area.
| Tech Info: iMac |
| Intel Core Duo Processor (2 GHz) |
| 2 Gb RAM |
| 256 Mb Video RAM |
| 1680 by 1050 pixels resolution |
| Up to 32 bit colour |
| OS X 10.4 |
| CD-RW/DVD-RW and hard drive (250 Gb) for data storage |
Strangeness made yet another comeback in the spring of 2006. Why did I suddenly order an iMac? Why right then? Who knows. Can't mistake or fault the happiness about it though. Here's more information.
| Tech Info: Macbook air |
| Intel core 2 duo processor (1,4 GHz) |
| 4 Gb RAM |
| 256 Mb Video RAM |
| 1366 by 768 pixels resolution |
| Up to 32 bit colour |
| OS X 10.6 |
| Solid state drive (64 Gb) for storage |
There seems to be something with me and spring, right? On the 8th of March 2011 my second Apple notebook was delivered. I wanted to be able to code on the go, and neither an Ipad nor, sadly, old Pomum was up to that task anymore. I decided to honour the Powerbook by recycling the name, as a badge of honor and tradition. Or something. Anyway, I have a somewhat modern notebook again and I hope to make the most out of it. More information to come.