Hello All!

[treintje]

Hi, my name is robin and i'm 46 years old. I started somewehere around 1980, in the time of the emerging Atari game console. I said to my parents that i wanted one too, but my parents - modern and innovative as they were - said: no, we are buying a REAL computer. But I want to play games! I said. Don't worry, it can play great games too!, my dad smiled. But you can also program your own! Now that was a thought which attracted me, and it still does.

This first machine was a VIC-20. Since the machine had a built-in basic interpreter, and there were small programming examples in the manual, i typed them in and i was addicted to programming from the first moment. After the VIC followed a C64, and finally an Amiga 500, which i completely earned on my own from my saturday job. I was about 17 by that time and was known to spend entire nights on programming. I have kept my Amiga 500 for a long time, but finally i switched to a 486DX with Windows 3.1, soon to be upgraded to a Pentium, Windows 95 and a Diamond Edge 3D - the very first 3d card!.

After that i more or less lost interest in the hobby and became a regular user. Later i got a nice job in which i could do some programming on a more or less regular basis - but not always.
I threw the 500 away since it took up space and i thought it was an invaluable piece of old junk in which nobody was interested anymore. The C64 was already long gone and the Vic20 (which was technically not mine but my parent's) had been sold when i purchased the C64.
How wrong i was! Later I got nostalgic and regretted the fact that I didn't have my old computers anymore.
So I started collecting. I currently own a Vic-20, C64, Amiga 500, A600, 1000, 1200 and 2000, and I'm slowly starting to work on the setup and upgrades of al machines. Before taking the step to collect them back i 've fiddled around with WinUAE a little bit, which encouraged me to buy a real amiga again. The 1200 was the first, and it is in my posession already for about 10 years now, but it took me a long time to actually find the time to work with it. (I have too many hobbies, i know :laugh. I found myself a new hobby, i guess! :smile:.

About my login name: "treintje" is Dutch and means "little train". I chose that name in the time when i had a model railway and was a member of a model train forum. I eventually lost interest and sold the stuff, but i kept using the nickname, since i am so used to it and i'm too lazy to change it.

Regards,
Robin

 

[EFTPOTRM]

Hello Robin. You might want to have a look at a certain Amiga Café with quite a lot of Dutch fans that share your history. o/


Sent from a mobile device.

 

[treintje]

On this forum?

 

[wiebow]

Hi train man. Nice to see you here... The forum he is referring to is a dutch Amiga user forum.. You can find it easily using google, i won't advert it here

 

[Metalion]

Hello treintje, and welcome.

I can relate, because I started going back to train models (I guess it's a generational thing) but never got far enough.
I bought some, but never had the time or space to build something.

 

[treintje]

Ah yes, i think i know that forum, visited it a few times, but didn't register. Forums tend to take up too much of my time because i like discussions, so to protect myself i keep my forum registrations to an absolute minimum.

- - - Updated - - -

I guess it's a generational thing

Yes it is. I picked it up when my then 6 year old son was at the time very interested in trains, and he got a model train set from his grandma. Because he was so young and the train set was rather expensive i decided to 'guide' him, and make it a combined hobby. We would build the track together, and i wanted to focus on automating the train operation with a computer. But it turned out that my son was not really interested in a fixed track; he would just lay down the tracks on the floor, under his bed, etc, and then just play with it. I did automate the first part of the track, but since my son lost interest i decided to stop and sell it. The good thing about it is that stopping with one hobby gives you room to pick up another ;-)