A timeline of my computers over the years. A collection of random facts and photographs to help me reminiscence. Nothing to see here, move along...
The humble beginnings of my computing hobby. I've had this computer from the late 80s up to 1993.
I mostly played games on it, my favourites being Gauntlet and Buggy Boy. And I started learning programming on the spectrum with the Sinclair BASIC interpreter built into its ROM.
Going from my old 8bit home micro to a 80486 32bit PC was almost a religious experience for me. I remember thinking back then that "now I finally have a real computer".
The power of the 486 brought with it the availability of an order of magnitude more interesting games to play, and a whole universe of programs to explore, to the detriment of my involvment with programming which dropped to a lower priority for a couple of years. I still played around a little bit with GW-BASIC and QBASIC now and then though.
Around late 2002 to early 2003 I replaced my old Pentium2 350 MHz with when I got a used Pentium3 for free. I switched to GNU/Linux as my main OS completely during the summer of 2003 when I installed Debian on this machine.
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Late 2005 I upgraded to an Athlon64 with some of the first money I got from Track7 Games. Quite a beast back then, re-installed Debian to make it fully 64bit.
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In january 2008 I got really fed up with my bulky ACER laptop which could run off its battery for about half an hour, and decided to buy a new one. After much deliberation I got an Apple MacBook rev3.1, which was much more lightweight, and could run for about 5-6 hours before recharging. I couldn't really stomach MacOS X, so I almost immediately installed Debian GNU/Linux on it.
During my MSc studies at Hull and the first couple of months of my stay in London, I used it as my primary computer, connected of course to an external monitor and keyboard as seen in the picture.
While the macbook was a wonderful portable computer, it made a rather lousy desktop. So first thing when I started my PhD in 2010 I bought a monster i5 quad-core machine to serve as my main workstation.