The Golden Era
My first exposure to computers was a Commodore 64 I got for Christmas and that led me on a path of nerdiness that hadn’t been discovered up until that point.
I studied the manual, PEEKed and POKEd and spent far too much time reading magazines and playing games. Although I would never have called myself a programmer, I learned the BASICs and it gave me a great foundational knowledge which I am still building upon today.
Later I would go through a slew of machines. Amiga 1200, Philips CD-i and Commodore CD32 before settling on the significantly more boring world of PC and PlayStation.
The Business of Business Machines
I fell in to IT early, being asked to assist in the IT department once a week of the place I was working as a post boy and soon becoming the sole IT person full time. And this was a great time to learn.
We operated a Novell Netware 3.1 network over Token Ring, with clients running MS DOS 5 and up, Windows 3.11 and eventually, Windows 95. I even had some exposure to an IBM AS/400 and the classic terminals that connected to it.
I honestly believe that getting in at such a fundamental ground floor helped me become the flexible quick learner I am today. Everything I learned became iterative from this point. I knew Token Ring and its benefits and pitfalls, so when it was time to migrate to Ethernet I could see its advantages (and its problems) and had to learn how to mitigate.
Moving from IPX/SPX to TCP/IP. From dedicated thin client terminal communication for the AS/400 over coax to terminal emulation on Windows. Netware file sharing and user accounts to NT4. NT4 to AD. Physical to virtual, virtual to cloud, all of these were iterative and all of these changes I could understand and grasp.
Microcomputers become Toys
I’ve now got a nice little collection of retro machines, mostly computers, which I’ve been working through to return to their former glory.
I won’t pretend I’m an electronics expert - far from it - but I have managed to fix some of the machines electrically and carry out preventative work on most.
The machines I have are all stock - I haven’t replaced drives with SD cards, installed RGB lighting or cranked up the CPUs because I think part of the experience is working within the design limitations of the machines. If I had two of each machine I may well go for one being stock and one being a souped up mega-monster but I think I’d need a bigger house for that.
I definitely get more out of the tinkering than the using, but thats partly because I’m not in a position at the moment to have everything permanently set up. When I’m able though, you can be sure that the Amiga 1200 will be serving web pages and the BBC will be spilling out Teletext to TVs throughout the house.