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Commodore 64

Along with all the other 40-somethings on this side of the planet, the first computer I ever bought was a Commodore 64. A friend of mine had bought one, and for a while I was an overly frequent visitor. Problems began when I discovered there was this "BASIC" thing built in, but he preferred to load games into it. Thrift, borrowing and begging (it cost 999 guilders at the time, but the Datasette was included as a special offer) ensured I had my own 64 before too long.

My C64. Because surely nobody has ever seen a picture of one of these before. Note modem stuck on.

Several sleepless nights later I had fashioned my first "hello world" which consisted of a sort of synthesizer program, which allowed you to play music on the keyboard. A strange choice for someone who has no musical knowledge or abilty, but the fact that this thing had the ability to make noises made me want to do something with that. When a visitor, a self-proclaimed computer expert, accused me of lying about having programmed it myself I realised that, for a novice, I must be rather good at this BASIC lark, and therefore must shut up about it.

The Commodore 64 was designed to be plugged into a television. Even though my TV wasn't large, it was hardly portable either, and its presence on the desk left little room for anything else. I was starting to feel a distinct need for a real monitor. The choice back then was green or amber. I decided against amber and went to a shop. I thought it would be a simple matter of me parting with my 500 guilders and walking out with a big box. No such luck, though. "Yes, we sell monitors," the shop assistent told me, "but not to people like you." I was flabbergasted. This was the only shop in town actually selling real monitors. I ended up buying one at a computer fair a couple of months later, and being offered a job at Philips into the bargain.

Next purchase was the printer. Programming long programs is simply easier with paper listings. Some people had generic printers, but I liked the idea of being able to print all those funky symbols the C64 produced. So it made perfect sense to pay twice as much for something that was twice as slow.

Commodore MPS 803 "Elke dag goedkoop"

Bigger programs have a tendency to load slowly, so a floppy disk drive was required. Huge big clunking floppy drive it was too. The disks were able to store an incredible 124 KB.

There is a floppy disk still in it. It's not legible, though. It's gone mouldy.

Next up was the purchase of a modem for the 64. This was a clunking big thing that had to be shoved into the big port in the back, and had switches and dials and whatnot on it. Before the hacking could begin, a terminal program had to be fashioned. This taught me about the concept of "feature creep" -- eventually this was almost a fully fledged word processor with word wrap, different fonts and colours for the different states of the modem, and heaven knows what other beautification. And a minor oversight in that the backspace key would be sent, rather than take the last letter away...

As there were no internet as such back in the day, everyone was collecting telephone numbers for all sorts of servers all over the place. Universities, bulletin boards, that sort of thing. Often you had to work out the settings required on the modem using trial and error. One day I got a message on the screen saying "Pick up the phone." With great trepidation I did, only to be told by an irate sysadmin that I had well-nigh destructed their server with my wrong settings. To this very day this has left me with an enduring feeling that there is absolutely nothing anonymous about tinternets. (It also did nothing to help cure my telephone phobia.)

A few years ago I came across the 64 in the cellar (actually for some reason they have multiplied and there's a few now) and decided to see whether it still worked. After a period of acclimatisation in the living room, I plugged the transformer into the mains, and it went boom whilst flashes came out. Luckily there's an C64 emulator for Windows.