On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 10:16 +0000, Alan Pope wrote:
I went ZX81 -> Spectrum 16K -> Spectrum 48K -> Spectrum +2
-> CPC 464
Then sold that and got a PC
Epson PC-AT with a 5.25" drive and an 8086 CPU running at 10MHz iirc. It had
a 10MB hard disk and mono text only screen.
I seem to have missed a few steps - I sold my ZX81 to buy
a new guitar, and didn't get back to computers until a
decade later, when my horticultural consultancy business
decided that Psion 3 was the answer to their computing needs ;-)
That pocket-sized computer had a parallel port adaptor
for my HP printer, a portable modem that I used with a
VT100 terminal emulator and a little shell script to
dial up and get e-mails, and a cribbage game to keep
me occupied on train jorneys. Battery life was around
a month from two AA cells. =o)
However it was a 16-bit deveice, and I wanted a 32-bit
to try out GNU, so a series of beige boxes with 486
and pentium chips passed through my hands, running
Debian, SuSE, RedHat, and FreeBSD, until I realised
that Debian was the one I kept coming back to, and there
I stayed :-)
Since then I've had various MIPS and PowerPC computers,
but seem to be back to Intel-compatibles for now (with
the exception of a couple of ARM devices sitting around
waiting to be re-flashed).
- Richard