Computers I Have Known, a Love Story (Premium)

While scanning in thousands of my old paper-based photos, I’ve come across people, places, and events that I’ve long forgotten. I’ve also come across many pictures of the computers I’ve owned over the years. I thought you might enjoy some of these.

I don’t have pictures of all of the computers I’ve owned or used, at least not yet, and certainly not the very earliest ones. My love affair with computers began in the early 1980s, when I would linger over the Commodore VIC-20 in Sears and imagine the games that I could create with the machine. (I have very specific memories of a Star Wars space battle game that wouldn’t be realized by professional video game designers until the Battlefront series many decades later. So I guess my imagination was just a bit ahead of what the technology was actually capable of.)

The computer I really wanted, of course, was the Commodore 64, which was first released in 1982. But that was initially more expensive---$600, if I remember correctly---than my parents would entertain. But we had gotten an Intellivision video game system, so I was able to convince them a year or two later to purchase a peripheral that forever guarantees I have the best-ever “first computer” story: My first computer was the Entertainment Computer System (ECS), an Intellivision add-on that turned the console into a real computer. It cost $150, plus the cost of some cables from Radio Shack to connect it a tape recorder for storage.

The ECS was pretty amazing, despite its obvious limitations, and you could use the character sprites and other graphics from any cartridge you plugged into the console in your own BASIC programs and games. So this was also my first experience with programming.

I did eventually get a Commodore 64 and outfitted it, over time, with a plotter printer, a cassette drive, and a 1541 disk drive; the display was a normal color TV. In time, I replaced it with a Commodore 64C and 1541C. After those were destroyed in a house fire in 1987, I wanted to buy an Amiga, but the local dealer didn’t have a payment plan, and I didn’t have any real credit cards. So I bought an incredibly expensive Apple IIGS system---$3300, I believe, at some crazy interest rate that was likely around 28 percent---that I then spent thousands more on trying to make it more like the Amiga. (I re-taught myself Pascal on this machine.) I finally sold it and bought a used Amiga 500 with a genlock, which I then spent thousands on via various upgrades. Right before me moved to Arizona I “upgraded” that to an Amiga 600---really a downgrade---because I couldn’t afford an Amiga 1200.

Once we got to Arizona, where we had moved so I could go back to school, I had to choose between Mac and PC so that I could take programming classes. The PC was the obvious choice, despite my disdain for Windows and Microsoft, and I finally built my first PC, which was based on an AMD 386SX chipset. Suffice to say, I was underwhelmed by the qu...