Hello all,
I've just subscribed, so let me put up a bit of self presentation :
I v'e been using computers since I was 8-10 years old :
at school, with the heavily subsidized french government's "Computer for everyone" program and their not-so-great-compared-to-other-stuff machines : the Thomson MO5,TO7 etc. family
at home, 12 years old, an Amstrad CPC 6128 in all its 8bit glory.
14, the epiphany with a Commodore Amiga 500
16, the follow on with the Amiga 1200
19-23'ish : the dark age: several years with PCs and self assembled networks and Linux servers and stuff. Going to college and beginning to work.
at the turn on the century, interested in Amiga again : 68060 accelerated A1200 with all bells and whistles, A3000 and Micro AmigaOne Machine (G3 -800 mhz)
Nowadays my main machines are PCs, but I've been gathering around more and more computers and consoles the last 10 years, not for the sack of collecting stuff, but because I feel each of them are worthy of interest.
I try to dedicate some (scarse) time to each of them and become a decent knowledgeable user.
In fact there are several reasons that got me interested in vintage hardware, and I may elaborate eventually, but at a glance :
Most of the games were ported to many different systems at the time, and as I was adding machines after machines in my belongings, I began to try and find as many versions of the same games as I could, which got me at last interested in gaming consoles and their wonders (I for one am now very fond of the NEC pc engine family).
I'm a big fan of the demoscene. I try hard to aquire demos for all my systems. That's probably the best way to see what these machines are really capable of. Most of the times, I'm astonished.
I love chiptune, keygen music, bitpop, what have you. But it's kind of a social handicap, really...
There were so many amazing, yet incompatible systems in the 80's and 90's. They formed a kind of ecosystem of sort. But I couldn't use most of them at that time. I 'm trying to catch up on what I couldn't do then by learning now how to use them as a "real" user.
Besides, they were witness of a time of huge creativity on the side of software, and were all trying to illustrate, each in their own way, what a personal computer can be.
Nowadays, things have settled on 2-3 major operating systems along with assorted hardware architectures.
I'm not saying it's necessarily bad (or am I?), and as a software developer I can certainly sympathize with the companies that had to port their programs to many different incompatible systems. But in computer as in biology, I think, an ecosystem without diversity is endangered...
Despite the abyss of capability and resource that separates current computers and those of the 8-16 bits era, the later were just as good to perform similar tasks of handling data, abeit with the obligation of being efficient. I feel it's a lesson to keep in mind that you don't "need" the actual, vast supply of computer power for your everyday needs. I welcome it as a occasional gamer and all, and there are many fields of acitvity that need every bit of power they can have, but as a sanity check it feels good to remind oneself that a lot can be done with very few, through optimization and cleverness.
Ho. And every now and then, more recently, I've begun to investigate programming actual stuff. With more or less contemporary toolkits, mind you, because I'm too lazy to bother getting used to line to line editors. I've actually set up a small developemnent environment on pc for 6502'ish assembly dev. (for Commodore 64) But I've never programmed in assembly, so it's gonna take some time... especially with my wife and children around ;-)
So hey, that's long enough. I feel this place seems good to find interesting hardware outside of the ebay frenzy of sky high prices.
Maybe some nice chats as well, among socially inapt nerds.
P.S : I've acquainted myself recently with some lore about Bulletin Board Services (BBS). Man, I completely missed that at that period ! Damn you minitel !! (joke for french people)
I've just subscribed, so let me put up a bit of self presentation :
I v'e been using computers since I was 8-10 years old :
at school, with the heavily subsidized french government's "Computer for everyone" program and their not-so-great-compared-to-other-stuff machines : the Thomson MO5,TO7 etc. family
at home, 12 years old, an Amstrad CPC 6128 in all its 8bit glory.
14, the epiphany with a Commodore Amiga 500
16, the follow on with the Amiga 1200
19-23'ish : the dark age: several years with PCs and self assembled networks and Linux servers and stuff. Going to college and beginning to work.
at the turn on the century, interested in Amiga again : 68060 accelerated A1200 with all bells and whistles, A3000 and Micro AmigaOne Machine (G3 -800 mhz)
Nowadays my main machines are PCs, but I've been gathering around more and more computers and consoles the last 10 years, not for the sack of collecting stuff, but because I feel each of them are worthy of interest.
I try to dedicate some (scarse) time to each of them and become a decent knowledgeable user.
In fact there are several reasons that got me interested in vintage hardware, and I may elaborate eventually, but at a glance :
Most of the games were ported to many different systems at the time, and as I was adding machines after machines in my belongings, I began to try and find as many versions of the same games as I could, which got me at last interested in gaming consoles and their wonders (I for one am now very fond of the NEC pc engine family).
I'm a big fan of the demoscene. I try hard to aquire demos for all my systems. That's probably the best way to see what these machines are really capable of. Most of the times, I'm astonished.
I love chiptune, keygen music, bitpop, what have you. But it's kind of a social handicap, really...
There were so many amazing, yet incompatible systems in the 80's and 90's. They formed a kind of ecosystem of sort. But I couldn't use most of them at that time. I 'm trying to catch up on what I couldn't do then by learning now how to use them as a "real" user.
Besides, they were witness of a time of huge creativity on the side of software, and were all trying to illustrate, each in their own way, what a personal computer can be.
Nowadays, things have settled on 2-3 major operating systems along with assorted hardware architectures.
I'm not saying it's necessarily bad (or am I?), and as a software developer I can certainly sympathize with the companies that had to port their programs to many different incompatible systems. But in computer as in biology, I think, an ecosystem without diversity is endangered...
Despite the abyss of capability and resource that separates current computers and those of the 8-16 bits era, the later were just as good to perform similar tasks of handling data, abeit with the obligation of being efficient. I feel it's a lesson to keep in mind that you don't "need" the actual, vast supply of computer power for your everyday needs. I welcome it as a occasional gamer and all, and there are many fields of acitvity that need every bit of power they can have, but as a sanity check it feels good to remind oneself that a lot can be done with very few, through optimization and cleverness.
Ho. And every now and then, more recently, I've begun to investigate programming actual stuff. With more or less contemporary toolkits, mind you, because I'm too lazy to bother getting used to line to line editors. I've actually set up a small developemnent environment on pc for 6502'ish assembly dev. (for Commodore 64) But I've never programmed in assembly, so it's gonna take some time... especially with my wife and children around ;-)
So hey, that's long enough. I feel this place seems good to find interesting hardware outside of the ebay frenzy of sky high prices.
Maybe some nice chats as well, among socially inapt nerds.
P.S : I've acquainted myself recently with some lore about Bulletin Board Services (BBS). Man, I completely missed that at that period ! Damn you minitel !! (joke for french people)
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