All the Computers ...
Or: The Computer Nostalgia Page
In the Beginning ...
Once upon a time, on a day long lost in the shrouds of the past, I played my first computer game. That probably was my first experience with computers altogether too, I may perhaps have seen someone play computer games before that. The prime suspect is Niklas Källgren, previous classmate, and his/his brother's Commodore 128. Boulder Dash may well have been the mysterious First Game, other possible candidates are Bubble Bobble and Transformers. Casseste tapes were the norm by which the 5½ inch disks were judged lightning-fast. Petter got a C-64 of his own too, when his father discovered that the PC was a more popular "work-computer". Games took long to load, were simple and generally below par by today's standards. On the other hand, no-one had even dreamt of today's standards back then. Not of today's hardware upgrading craze either for that matter ... The SID chip produced some really great tunes which simply won't sound as good in any other format. Bubble Bobble and Commando are just two examples, nothing except SID emulation do them justice. Finally, I got one too, and was able to spend eternities waiting for loading from cassette to fail ...
The Victor VP-12 (perhaps ...)
I can't say for sure if this one should go before or after the C-64 to be in chronological order. Anyway, it wasn't really ours, and we didn't keep it for all that long. It was a portable, by that time's standards, PC with a monochrome screen, PC speaker sound and perhaps even a mouse. My father got it from his job, probably to do work type of things on. That's irrelevant in this case. What we remember it for around here is Digger. Simple, fast and fun, and the sounds still rank among the best things I've heard from a PC speaker. It had another game or two, Othello was one of them (and the computer spent ages thinking on the higher difficulty levels), as well as some primitive and limited form of GUI (it might even have been some version of Windows ...). Any other facts remain shrouded in mystery ...
The Commodore 64
| Tech Info: C-64 |
| MOS 8510 Microprocessor (about 1MHz) |
| 20 K ROM |
| 64 K RAM, 38 K user available in BASIC |
| 320 by 200 pixels resolution, 16 colours |
| Commodore BASIC 2.0 |
| Cassette tapes for data storage |
Not sure which year I got it, 1988 is a qualified guess, but it was for Christmas and I had chickenpox. Along with it I got Batman: The Movie and a strange joystick called the Navigator, which gave you sores. Nevertheless, it didn't stop me from playing games. I even tried, a few short attempts I admit, to learn BASIC.
| Tech Info: Amiga 500 Plus |
| Motorola 68000 16 bit processor (7,09 MHz) |
| 1 Mb RAM (expanded to 1,5 Mb) |
| 512 K ROM |
| 320 by 200 to 1280 by 256 pixels resolution |
| Up to 4096 colours |
| Amiga DOS 2.04 |
| Floppy disks for data storage |
The wonderful Amiga 500 started sneaking its way into my friend's homes not long, a year or two perhaps, after the C-64s had settled down and made themselves comfortable. With 0,5 Mb of RAM, up to 4096 colours and four channel stereo sound and, also very important, the blazing load speeds of the internal floppy disk drive, it blew poor 64 away. It still blows a lot of things around, especially when compared to PCs. For example, Plug 'n' Play was taken for granted, and you never had to fiddle for hours to free up memory. Games were plenty of course, and some of them are still as great. No sport game on any PC can beat the pure, furious energy of Speedball II on a TV (it's the only two player game ever to put steam on my bedroom window ...). No football game can compete with the playability of Sensible Soccer. And, as I've said before, the Wing Commander theme sounds better in mod than any other format or version. Oh, did I mention it did voice synthesis too?
The Apple Macintosh LC II
| Tech Info: LC II |
| Motorola 68030 32 bit processor (15,6672 MHz) |
| 4 Mb RAM |
| 512 K ROM |
| 320 by 200 to 1280 by 256 pixels resolution |
| Up to 256 colours |
| System 7 |
| Disk and hard drives (69,6 Mb) for data storage |
Our first, and only, Mac. Probably the computer intended for work on which the most actual work has been done, the main reason being we didn't have a lot of games for it. The game I've played most on it is probably Civilization, it both looked better and loaded faster, being on a hard drive, than the Amiga version. I kind of like the sound of that hard drive too ...
The P133
| Tech Info: P133 |
| Intel Pentium processor (133 MHz) |
| 32 Mb RAM |
| 1 Mb Video RAM (expanded to 2, then 4 Mb) |
| Up to 1280 by 1024 pixels resolution |
| Up to 32 bit colour |
| Windows 95 (later 98) |
| Disk and hard drives (1,2 Gb) for data storage |
The autumn of 1995 saw the first PC enter our house, and the internet with it. The hardware craze was about to reach us ... For a while, it felt new and powerful, but not for all that long. Soon, state of the art games made it stutter and choke nervously, and the once astronomical 1,2 Gb harddrive got more and more claustrophobic. It was kind of fun to drop a Voodoo2 board in this machine. Everything started to look tremendous, but moved quite slow at times because the processor couldn't catch up with the 3d card. When you increased screen resolution to what used to be killing levels, Voody just ignored it and preserved the pace, which was severely limited by the processor. Fortunately, a faster computer was on its way ...
The PII 450
| Tech Info: PII 450 |
| Intel Pentium II processor (450 MHz) |
| 128 Mb RAM |
| 8 Mb Video RAM |
| 12 Mb Voodoo2 board |
| Up to 1600 by 1200 pixels resolution |
| Up to 32 bit colour |
| Windows 98 |
| Disk and hard drives (9,4 Gb) for data storage |
About three years after getting the P133, my father purchased this computer, which laughed at the collected computing power of the house's older computers. 3d game framerates took a quantum leap when I threw in the Voodoo2 (rather cool, those raised 2s ...), finally there was a processor which could keep up with it. You knew some additional power was available when Mp3 music could be played at the same time as Ignition without notable slowdown. Hell, it's even able to emulate a 14 Mhz Amiga pretty good ...
... which brings us rather neatly to the present. This computer still manages to run the games we throw at it in a respectable fashion, the question is for how much longer that will be the case ... And what will come after this one? P12 56 000? Things were easier back in the days of the A 500 (sighs) ...
The PIII 700
| Tech Info: PIII 700 |
| Intel Pentium III processor (700 MHz) |
| 128 Mb RAM (now upgraded to 384) |
| 32 Mb Video RAM (GeForce chip) |
| Up to 1600 by 1024 pixels resolution |
| Up to 32 bit colour |
| Windows 98 |
| Disk, hard drives (15 Gb, now 75) |
| and CD burner for data storage |
On August 1, 2000 I walked into local computer store Sekvencia, meaning to ask a bit about the cost of adding certain parts to a computer package of theirs. The next day I was there again to pick up my new computer. Buying stuff is too easy ...
Addtion on July 7, 2001.
There's been some upgrades since the original purchase ... February 15 this year the amount of memory suddenly tripled and on July 5 the hard drive space went from a slightly crowded 15 Gb to a seemingly bottomless 75 Gb due to strategic investments during a certain excursion to Asia ...
The Duron 750
| Tech Info: Duron 750 |
| AMD Duron processor |
| (750 MHz, overclocked to 866 MHz) |
| 512 Mb RAM |
| 32 Mb Video RAM (TNT2 chip) |
| Up to 32 bit colour |
| Windows 98 |
| Disk and hard drives (40 GB) for storage |
On December 26 2001, I spotted this one up for sale at Blocket (see external at top of page). I'd wanted a second computer to play around with for some time and looked at several others (with much lower specs and prices) at the same site offering even less than the asking prices, but for this one I felt no need to barter, just a little worry that this wasn't the right thing to spend money on right now :-) ... After a few hours of wandering back and forth and hesitating I finally got myself together and picked up the phone. The next day at 14:00 I was back home and a happy owner of a second PC outperforming my first one.
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