My very first computer was an
Alice, a french made computer ; a very impressive beast (RAM : 8 kb
CPU: Motorola 6803 )
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| The original box with tapes.... yes tapes |
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| The beast itself |
It meant a lot to me ( actually I still have it in a storage room in France ), first because my grandfather bought it to me - for reason I have never explained or understood, may be he had some insight - a good one - that this would be the future, secondly because the manual was illustrated by one of my favorite comic artist Moebius ( but I did not know that at the time ).
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| Illustrated by Moebius.... |
I remember soon after, the school started using
T07 and
MO5 as a part of a sponsored state program to promote informatics.
You can read more about Alice history (in French) on this wiki:
http://alice.system-cfg.com/
There you can also find links to some emulators.
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My second was an
Amstrad CPC464 ( 64 kB RAM CPU: Zilog Z80A )
I started to play games ( a lot more than previously ) with that, I particularly fondly remember: "Infernal runner" by Eric Chahi
You can actually find a very good Java emulator online here :
http://www.cpcbox.com/ you can even load games - without the dreadful line by line loading time.
Somehow the computer through more powerful, became less exciting and more an utility tool.
My third was a PC intel 486, it was still under MS-DOS, but had the very premise of a GUI (an ultra basic explorer), but it allow me to be a bit more productive with word processing and some early spreadsheet - which if I recall correctly I use to keep track of my game scores.
My fourth was a PC tower, and finally a jump to today familiar Windows ( 95 I think ), it survived for a long time, throughout my college years and even at the beginning of my fully fledge worker years, helped I have to admit by multiple and regular upgrade ( memory / hard drive / OS .... ). By that time i was mingling with unix at college and later at work.
I then switch to laptop with a sony vaio, before succumbing 5 years ago to an Apple White MacBook....
