My Computers

My first computer was a ZX81 (see a ZX81 site if you feel the need). I learnt Z80 assembly language and used a direct brain-machine interface during many long night stints.

My next computer was the Amstrad CPC464 which I've still got somewhere. If you want to see what made it tick, have a look at a picture of the insides. This picture has been plagarised from The Computing Museum. The 464 was quite a nice little machine with loadsa games available. I learnt Forth and started on Pascal with this little beastie. I also bought the 3" disk-drive and the Amstrad DMP2000 dot matrix printer which was Crap (with a capital C). At this point I almost purchased an Enterprise but luckily it wasn't around long enough for me to save up the pocket money! If you want some info on the CPC machines start here.
I once had an Apricot Xi - a lovely machine. The monitor was the clearest and most stable I have used to this day and the massive 5Mb hard drive made a really nice comforting sound. The picture here is of the dual floppy machine - the one with the hard drive was black. If you know anybody that's got one, I might buy it off them because some ba**ard stole mine when he/she broke into my house in Hull when I was a student in the Electronic Engineering Department.

While working for Cambridge Computers, I owned a Z88. But Finally, I went on to program IBM PC/AT's and compats. My first PC (oo-ooh) was an AST 386 which stood me in good stead for many years. I slowly upgraded parts of it until I got the the stage where only original part left was the keyboard. I happened to run Microsoft Diagnostics one day and looked at the Computer... section. I was a little more than astounded when it told me that it was an AST Research machine! The ghost in the machine lives on!

Worth a look if you are interested in this sort of thing is The Virtual Computer Museum. This is a list of many online museums. To get to the computing museums, follow the "Computer-related museums" link. There are lots of links to follow from here.