Like many IT enthusiasts my interest goes back a long way. Trying to pin this down though is quite difficult. Back in the late 1970s I bought every copy of a magazine - OMNI - that mixed technology, science and science fiction. At school some of my friends did computing, visiting the nearby technical college. I missed the boat on that occasion.
Then in OMNI they started to advertise the Sinclair ZX80 and in Nursing Times there was a computers in nursing supplement, it was called CINNEWS I think. There were no doubt other influences, but I decided to wait for the ZX81 before jumping on-board.
After the ZX81 3.25 MHz 1K of RAM (added 16K RAM pack) it goes as follows:
- BBC micro MODEL 'B'
- Elonex 286 12Mhz
- Elonex 486 33Mhz
- Dell Pentium II 266Mhz
- Evesham Pentium 4 2.66Ghz
The Evesham PC was 6 years old last November. It's still going strong, though would benefit from a major sort out and its days are numbered as the
main machine.
The latest purchase is an Asus Eee PC. Although we are still getting acquainted, I really like this little piece of kit. It seems I've done a
Palin and gone full-circle.
I hope so - because back in 1981 BASIC and programming really took hold for a couple of years at least before the family came along and now the youngest is 14 - how time and technology flies....
At the Eden Project there is a sculpture which depicts the e-hardware an average Jo will use and dispose of in a lifetime (those teeth are made up of computer mouse). Overall this amounts to 3.3 tonnes.
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965
