Will writes about his life in computers as part of another meme that seems to be spreading. My life in computers is indicative of quite how poor my family were when I was growing up - a bit painful in places, alas.

I remember my first experience of a computer at home was my elder sister’s Vic20. I don’t remember ever getting a chance to do more than play games on it when I was about 5 or so, but I remember looking at the source code for BASIC programs and thinking “I wish I could do that”. Occasionally my Dad (at that time an accountant, he later became a systems analyst working on AS/400 systems in California) would bring home an Apple or IBM system to take a look at.

At primary school we regularly got to work on a BBC Master, mostly working in a language called LOGO that was meant to teach us about angles, recursion in geometry and the basics of algorithms I suppose.

When I got to secondary school, I started to teach myself during lunch breaks in the computer room - by borrowing a book from the school library on BBC BASIC and taking up the computer teacher’s offer of letting us use the computer suite for our own projects during Lent in return for a donation to CAFOD (I went to a Catholic school), I got to understand the basics.

For several years I didn’t have access to a computer at all at home. I would spend my evenings writing out programs on paper at home and dry-running them before going into school the next day and typing them in and seeing how I fared. This meant I developed a real eye for syntax that I’ve since lost in lieu of “Save, tab over, run” - something I need to get back, perhaps.

At the age of about 12 or 13 I managed to get an Amstrad CPC 6128 at home thanks to my Dad swagging it from my now step-Mum for a few week’s pocket money. I should point out that this was at a time when most of my peers were coding on Amiga 500 and Atari ST machines - I was fully a whole generation out - and it would be like giving somebody an Amiga today. Even so, I was loved it and was grateful for the chance to write code at home. It had the same 3” disk as Amstrad PCW machines, it’s own green monochrome monitor (CPCs didn’t plug into TVs) that used to give me headaches and my mother would complain if I left it set up in the living room for more than about 15 minutes.

Around this time my Father then donated to me an original twin-floppy IBM XT. It also had a dedicated green screen and was at the time I got it approximately 7-8 years old. It didn’t have a graphics card and had serious problems running contemporary software, however it did introduce me to MS-DOS and the ‘Microsoft way’ of doing certain things. This machine died when I took it around to a friend’s house a few years later, and I have a horrible feeling my step-dad eventually put the enclosure in a bin - something I deeply regret now for the environmental consequences as much as the fact I would love to have kept it for sentimental reasons.

I also seem to recall a BBC Micro coming home around this time that was pretty much DOA despite it costing a considerable amount to purchase from one of my school teachers. That little lesson taught me a lot about who to trust and how to check out a machine completely before purchasing - a boot-up is not the same as a functioning machine. I don’t know where that machine ended up.

I mostly however begged, borrowed and paid for computer time - my hometown of New Mills was the first place in the UK outside of London to get a cyber-cafe, and so I spent a lot of time hanging around there and the computer suite at the sixth form college I ended up attending (The Ridge) using Internet access as and when I could and coding up stuff in QBasic and occasionally C. At University I was regularly in the computer labs, almost moving into UMIST’s MSS J9 and Sackville cluster at times. I was working full-time in the suite in Kilburn building in the summer of 1997, and spent most of time trying to work out how to get around the various systems admins had put in place to prevent me from doing useful things (like, for example, run a decent compiler).

It wasn’t until I was about 20 years old that I actually ended up owning my own system that could reasonably be argued as being ‘up-to-date’. Prior to that, it had always been somebody else’s hardware or a generation or two out of date. That first machine was a cheap Taiwanese import laptop with an AMD processor bought from Morgan Computer on Piccadilly approach. I carried it through a mob of rioting Millwall fans and Police horses outside Piccadilly station to get it home.

Since then I’ve owned a whole variety of machines, mostly bought off eBay because I hate paying showroom prices and know what I’m doing. The most noted of these machines amongst friends being my Thinkpad 240 (nicknamed ‘Stinky’) which I infamously took to pieces in the middle of the pub during a BSDUG because somebody had a screwdriver handy. My most recent self-build was a Shuttle XPC that now serves my sister, brother-in-law and niece at their home in the Peak District: it is considerably faster and better equipped than any machine I could have ever dreamed of owning as a teenager.

I’m writing this on an iBook G4 which has been my primary machine for the last year or so. I have with me an old Celeron desktop I use for the occasional journey into Windows, a pile of older hardware I keep because it deserves a good home (a Sun IPX, a Vax, various old laptops that served me well over the years). It’s time for a major round of upgrades though.

I’m currently thinking through my choices on my next purchase, planned for June or thereabouts. Currently I’m thinking a 15” Macbook might be a good fit because I need to be able to run Linux, OS X and Vista and one machine to do all three would be a good fit. Staying portable gives me some flexibility as well, although the price premium for Apple hardware is really bothering me - I might just abandon supporting OS X and go for a cheaper x86 machine that is better equipped.