My computer hardware history
I was just chatting with a collegue about my hardware history and thought it was time for an update. My hardware list is as follows:
- MSX2 HB-F9P
- Amiga 500 1MB + Action Replay III
- Amiga CDTV 1MB + DIP switch KS1.3
- 486DX33 8MB + SB16 + GUS
- 486DX266 32MB + SB16 + GUS
- Pentium 200MHz MMX @ 225MHz 128MB + GUS IW + PowerVR + Voodoo2
- Pentium 4 1GHz 512MB
- Pentium D 3,4GHz 2GB + ATI HD2600XT + NVidia 9800GT
The first computer that I saw as a kid was an Atari 2600 which friends of mine had and that was pretty amazing. A few years later I got my own computer, the MSX2. Later the father of the friends that had the Atari 2600 bought an Amiga 2000 and I really was flabbergasted when I saw it in action. I was already in love with the MSX2 but it extended to the Amiga and soon I was an owner of an Amiga 500! I somewhere sold my Amiga hardware which I needed to do to buy a PC but now I regret that dicision :-).
The MSX died somewhere around the year 2000 when heavy rain filled the basement where it was stored but a friend wanted to get rid of his MSX2 hardware. Two Philips NMS 8280 but only one keyboard. I still have these devices and sometimes boot them up with either one of the few cartridges that survived the basement pool experiment.
Somewhere a long I also owned a NES but I was and probably never will be a console person.
I learned programming on the MSX in BASIC and a little bit hacking with disassemblers. On the Amiga I started with AMOS, REXX and later on SAS C and 68000 assembly. I then made the transition to the PC where I was first programming in Turbo Pascal combined with x86 assembler and later on Watcom C/C++. I then started programming for a living and programmed MSVC/VB6 in Visual Studio 6 in Windows with COM(+) and later on in .net 1.0.
I was always interested in other development platforms and operating systems. I experimented a lot with all kinds of languages and Linux distributions, OS/2 and BeOS but nowadays I primarily program in c# because I am a professional .net developer for a living but I still experiment in my free time although I’m not such a geek anymore as I was 10 years ago.