December 16, 2005
20 Years of Computing
This christmas I am going to celebrate my first 20 years of owning a computer. Christmas 1985 I got my first computer, a Philips VG-8020. A few weeks later I also got a tape recorder for it, so I could actually permanently store my first attempts at programming. I also got a Competition Pro joystick, which was the non-plus-ultra back then ;-)
Photo courtesy of Boris Jakubaschk, www.homecomputermuseum.de
The VG-8020, however, was not the first computer that I ever worked with. A few months earlier my dad borrowed a Commodore 64 from a friend. I used that C-64 to test my first BASIC programs that I wrote earlier, using pen and paper.
My first activities with the computer were typing in the sample programs that could be found in its user manual, writing my first own programs (which later included lots of different games), and, to a lesser degree, playing games. Back then I only had two games - Boulder Dash and 737 Flight Simulator.
Two years later I sold the computer and replaced it with a Philips VG-8235, which featured an integrated 3.5 inch floppy disk drive. A new level of comfort. This was also the beginning of the age of goto-less programming for me, thanks to Turbo Pascal 3.0, which I got for that computer. I still have the original box.
In 1991 I bought a Macintosh LC. Originally it had an Apple black-and-white monitor attached, which looked cool and had an absolutely sharp image. Unfortunately, the monitor stopped working after a few years of intensive use. The Mac LC, though, is still working.
With the Mac LC, my career as a C and C++ programmer started. I used the excellent THINK C, which had an IDE including a comfortable source-level debugger. I also did my first commercial project (an embeddable database engine which ran on Sun OS) with it.
Today the Mac LC sits in my office (as shown in the picture), however, monitor, keyboard and mouse are connected to the Mac mini next to it.
