Following a post to the “Community of Bloggers” forum, it struck me that it might be appropriate to cover my entire computer history in the form of a blog post - so here it is.
The story probably starts in the late 1970s.
Dad came home from work one day with a large cardboard box, emblazoned with the logo “Atari”, that neither my brother or I had ever heard of. It contained a fake teak and black plastic thing that looked like a spare part for a spaceship - with switches and stuff on it - and two wiggly stick things. It had black plastic blocks that you plugged in the top, and a wire that plugged into the television.
Wow! Space Invaders on the telly at home! And you didn’t have to pay for it! And some fighter plane / bomber / tank game called Combat… and of course “Space War”.
It was an Atari 2600. I’m not sure quite why it got bought, but we became the family with square eyes. There are still photos around of our family and other children sat on the floor around the television, either weilding the controllers or watching the ensuing action.
Strangely, I was more interested in my Star Wars toys than the Atari, which was really my older brother’s.
Several years passed, and then for Christmas in 1983 (I think), I had a gigantic box to unwrap. It was a computer (“what’s a computer, Dad?”). It had the letters MSX printed proudly across the box, was made by Sony, and looked ace.
When you switched it on, it made the old Atari look truly crap. This had a keyboard and everything - and a cartridge too - with a wicked game called “Yie Ar Kung Fu” on it.
After a couple of days of taking turns to play Kung Fu solidly, like all children my mind began to wander. I discovered that you could use the keyboard on the MSX to write instructions to it, and get it to say things like “YOU ARE AN IDIOT” endlessly down the screen… I was programming, and didn’t realise at all.
Moving on again, we reach about 1988, and our family had become interested in Music. Mum and Dad both played the electronic organ (or “keyboard” as they are now known), and had a Yamaha MC200 (the start of a long line of bigger and better keyboards). The keyboard had a socket on the back called “MIDI” that you could apparently plug a computer into.
One day Dad dissappeared off to Evesham, and came back with an Atari ST to plug into the music keyboard. Apparently you could run a program called a “sequencer” on it called “Steinberg” so the computer could record what you played… all the musicians were doing it apparently, and the Atari had built in MIDI sockets.
By now I was doing “Computer Studies” as an exam subject at school, and realised the enormity of what Dad had bought. In today’s terms, he had gone out and bought a supercomputer, and he was going to use it as a glorified music box.
Needless to say it never got used to record music. Well… it did, but very rarely indeed. I learned to program properly with it, it had fantastic games, and was the turning point towards me becoming a computer geek.
The Atari (through various upgrades) saw me all the way through technical college and my A-Levels. On my final day of college in 1992 I went up to the computer lab to ask if I could print something out, and was directed over to a brand new machine sat in the corner.
After we switched it on, the screen came up saying “Microsoft Windows 3.0”. I’ll save the rest for another day…