Whilst preparing some of the pages for this site I began thinking about my journey into IT and how my outlook on technology has changed.
My computing history ran alongside an engineering career, something I still have a deep love and affection for. I am still fiercely proud of my engineering skills and experience.
In the 1980’s I bought a new Commodore Vic20 which I had for several years before acquiring an Apple ][e with 2 x 5.25″ external floppy drives that the monitor sat on. That gave way finally to the onslaught of IBM and an XT (that I still have) took pride of place. A whopping 2MB RAM – power computing! Then began the x86 climb along Moore’s law. I progressed to a 268, 386 – and that was joined on the motherboard by a 387 co-processor. I thought it was cool, anyway!
486 SX -> DX (different versions) gave way to Pentiums. Brings tears to my eyes just remembering! Especially installing Windows 3.11 from 500 (ok, 9 – I think, 7 with the OS and 2 with the network drivers if memory serves) floppy disks while my wife was shouting at me to leave it alone and come and have dinner! Ahh – happy days!
Well, that’s changed again and again over the years. On the early 486 I ran SuSE 5 – again I still have the 5 CDs that it came with. Early KDE – that was soooo slow!