My Hardware History

Why do I always spell Vaoi wrong? I don't know. But the TX17 is by far and away the sexiest and moist capable laptop I've ever owned. I sought it out before it was released, and waited months for it to come - it was *exactly* what I needed. It is so small and light (1.2kg) I can throw it into my briefcase and not notice the load. The screen is of reasonable size, and so clear and bright, dual layer DVD burner, bluetooth, wifi, you name it has got it. I love it!

My first Palm - and boy was I excited. My Sharp organiser which had lasted me three years fnally gave up the ghost, so I moved up!

My current laptop. Notable for its wireless networking which I find very convenient, and its enormous screen (1600x1200) which makes it an enormous laptop.

This was my first windows machine. It was provided by my work, so I decided to move to windows rather than upgade my mac as I was rather short of cash at the time and it was a pretty speccy machine. I have suffered under Windoze ever since, but realise there are some advantages, the main one being you never have to ask the question of any software or hardware "Will it run on a mac?". I wrote the majority of my Palm software on this machine, as well as developing many websites, until it was replaced in late 2003.

I loved this machine because it was a friend in time of need. Bought by my sister Rosie in the US and brought to me in Belgium for Xmas of 1996, it was my lifeline to sanity in the slightly lonely times of life in Europe. At that time, it looked as if Apple and the Macintosh would go under, swallowed by the hegemony of Micro$oft. As it happened, it was (at this stage) my last Mac and my first laptop. I started programming both Palms and websites on this mac, and started using the internet heavily. It also had my first CD ROM drive, and had a lovely option not seen before or since in a laptop - "bookcovers". This was a slide off plastic section of the outside cover, under which you place any kind of adornment for the exterior of your laptop.

Another dream machine, this one was on special, but even so it was nearly a year's income at the time (about $5000) and I couldn't even afford a keyboard! (I borrowed one from teh shop for about 2 months). But boy was it fast! It was the fastest "all in one" monochrome Mac ever made, and I contiunued to use it as my main computer until 1996. When paired with the huge A4 pivot monitor seen in the picture, it was a marvellous machine for laying out pages. It was the first computer I used to access the internet in 1994 (28K baud modem!). I borrowed a CD ROM drive to play "Myst" which was one of the first games to be released on CD. At that time, all the other machines that had the 68030 processor had an "x" tacked on after their name, but for some reason when the older Mac SE was upgraded with the new processor they decide not to follow this naming tradition.

My first Mac! The excitement! I had droolled over the Macintosh from the first moment I saw it - the mouse, those gorgeous 3.5 inch floppy discs, the amazing software. I was a dream computer for me, but expensive and out of reach until after high school. The funny thing is I never really programmed a mac, despite intentions to do so. At university I moved onto design, spending all my time on Macs doing "Desktop Publishing" as it was called (does anyone say that now?). I Used this for the rest of my university career to earn money.

This Mac had just a single 800K floppy drive, and you could put all the system software and quite a few documents on that one double density drive. It was a low end system though - it had no SCSI port so could never have a hard drive.

I think I bought the Atari 800XL about 1 year after the 600XL, and shifted the old one off to a school friend. I bought it with money earned from programming. This was my main programming machine from 1984 until I went to University in 1987, and I did a multitude of things with it. I wrote software in basic initially, but in the end most of my software was written in Assembler (also known as "machine code"), in this case it was the 6502 language. Being a single byte language meant you were essentially limited to 256 different commands. It was sensationally fast compared to BASIC which was interpreted line by line. I also cracked a lot of software - in particular, a mate and I worked out how to copy game cartridges onto floppy discs. We never sold any of course. Finally I sold this in about 1988 or 1989, having bought my first Mac in 1988.

This, the first computer that was truly mine, I programmed after I cut my teeth on the Exidy Sorceror my father bought in 1978. It was, in those days, a pretty nice looking machine. A forerunner of the "beyond biege box" now common with Apple Macintoshes. It was unpopular when compared to the computer that sold millions at that time, the COmmodore 64. I pretty quickly moved onto the Atatri 800XL - more details there.

This was my father's computer, but it had special meaning for me as I started programming it at age 9. Initially I programmed in the BASIC language supplied onthe cartridge that came with the machine, but I did write some programs in Z80 assembler as well.

The Sorcerer was probably the 6th "Personal Computer" in history, the first 5 being (in order):
1. Altair
2. Apple I
3. Commodore PET
4. Apple II
5. TRS-80