A page for us, computer freaks:
Well, what are you waiting for! If you're NOT a computer freak, you still have time to click HERE and return to my Welcome Page!
Still here?
Well… that means you'll be interested in what I have to say here J
Throughout the 10 years I've been involved with computers, I've worked on many of them, played games on them, programmed them, opened their cases to see what's in them and many other interesting stuff J .
You did the same and have some knowledge you want to share with me? Well then, e-mail me!
This is a list of the computers I used, and also the stuff I know about them.
Probably many of you have lost your "computer virginity" with this machine. And quite a first time it was!
A wonderful computer in every way. Great graphics and sound, LOTS of software, easy to use and sold on a very affordable price, there was no chance that it wouldn't become a best seller.
Specifications:
Processor: Zilog Z80, an extremely popular at its time 8-bit processor.
Memory: 128 KB of memory (a great achievement for a 8-bit machine)
Graphics system: 640x200 max. resolution , 16 colors max.
Sound: A single channel that could play digital samples as well as digitized music.
Operating System: Athough most of the work was done from the wonderful Locomotive Basic 1, that the computer had in its ROM, shipped with the CPC came an improved version of Digital Research's CP/M, CP/M Plus. A great operating system that did not have the fate it deserved, although for a brief period of time every software company that respected itself wrote things for the CP/M.
The above characteristics produced a great system for then, in many ways better than PCs of its time (graphics, sound) and thanks to its great price and the availability of software, it sold millions. CPCs can still be found everywhere, and with good reason.
My relationship with the CPC:
I first used an Amstrad CPC 6128 at a local computer shop in my home town, Katerini. It was the first computer shop around (it was spring of 1988, I was 11 years old). I used to go to that shop every day I had free time. I went with a friend of mine who would mostly play games. I, instead, opened a BASIC book, and started to type in some listings onto that green CPC monitor… J Great times!
The CPC's Basic, by Locomotive Software, was an absolutely GREAT language. Everything was so easy to do… No comparison with the absolutely incomprehensible Commodore BASIC that came with C64.
Some CPC links:
By the time I learned some things about Basic, and about computers in general, I started pressuring my dad into buying me a CPC. At the Thessaloniki international fair of '88 (on September) he decided that he should probably buy a PC instead. I went along with the idea, since it was easier for me to convince him for a PC. I would just tell him it would help him with his work! And that I did. And so did the guy that sold the PC. So, we ended up with a beautiful creamy-white Amstrad PC 1512 (I was kind of stuck on the Amstrad name, from my love for the CPC). So next, I will tell you about my 1512. I came to get much closer to a CPC later on in my life, when a friend gave it to me on loan for about 2 months. I had put it in my bedroom, and programmed the hell out of it. I wish I could find that 3 inch disk with my CPC programs now… L
Another best seller of the time, this time for a bit more professional use. It was a 100% IBM compatible PC, sold at a great price and packed with lots of extra software by Digital Research and Locomotive. Also, its graphic system was an improved version of the standard IBM CGA that supported a special operating mode that gave out all 16 colours in its maximum resolution of 640x200 pixels. It was the first computer I actually owned, and sadly, I don't have it any more. Someone broke into my dad's office sometime in 1991 and stole it. It was one of the saddest days of my life.
Specifications:
Processor: Intel 8086, I guess you're all familiar to this one
Memory: 512 KB. It seemed so huge, that I always ran RAMDrive to find something to do with all that memory J
Graphics System: A patent of Amstrad for an improved CGA, that supported 16 colors at the maximum CGA's resolution, 640x200 pixels. Unfortunately, it was not compatible with EGA's graphic modes, and no software used it except for what was shipped with the Amstrad.
Sound: The standard PC beeper. Absolutely TERRIBLE. However, the fact that I could play music pieces so simply with GW-Basic's PLAY command, was more than enough for me. Also, I can still remember the great car sounds from Accolade's Test Drive J
Operating System: Microsoft's original MS-DOS 3.2 It was the latest version of the well-known operating system. It supported hard disks and everything. Also, with the Amstrad came some great software from Digital Research and Locomotive. It was Gem Desktop! Yes! For all you Atari maniacs, it was (almost) the same GUI that the Atari used, in a special customized version that even supported Amstrad's graphics card. Locomotive Software, who created the CPC's Basic, wrote for the Amstrad PC a version of their Basic that run on GEM. It was Locomotive BASIC 2. A beautiful language, absolutely beautiful. It supported windows, buttons, almost all of GEM's functions. And you didn't have to use line numbers and stuff. A language far ahead of its time, since Microsoft wrote Qbasic many years after that. However, even I did not use Basic 2 a lot. I did most of my programming with Microsoft's GW-Basic, since that was the only language I could find info and sample sources about.
My relationship with the 1512:
Being the first computer I owned, it was the first one I got to experience in some depth. I had run almost everything on it! WordStar, dBase, Lotus 1-2-3… and of course, A LOT of games. I think I still have those on some low-density 5,25'' disks. J And of course I programmed it… I have written about 200 programs on GW-Basic, and about 10 or 20, in Debug's "assembler" J . Most of my then programs were completely useless, they were mainly a way to spend my time and to… exercise my brain. I had spent ENDLESS hours in front of its (very expensive at the time) color CGA monitor, doing almost everything…I also had a printer attached to it, an Amstrad DMP-3000. I must have printed everything humanly imaginable on that printer… From my own correspodence paper (to write letters to my pen-friends), to campaign posters for the school elections J . Of course, at some point, my dad's accountant got to use it to keep track of our company's finance… I believed there would never be anything more to be done with a computer than what my 1512 could do… Internet and multimedia were (to me) science fiction at the time.
As it was just another PC-compatible, it lacked the "personality" of the CPC or the popular 16-bit machines like Amiga and Atari ST. But, its unique CGA, the special Amstrad design, and DR's software, managed to make it a little different than all the rest. I got very attached to the 1512, and the articles from the "Amstrad World" magazine (in its Greek version) which I subscribed to at the time, made me feel very special for owning that machine. Check out some of the Amstrad links below to share something of that special Amstrad feeling… J Also, you may like to visit the GEM page, from where you can download the entire GEM Desktop and also some great software for GEM. It is a great operating system, especially if you own an older system. The entire OS, with a word processor, a paint program, and even a DTP application can fit on a high density floppy! And they all work VERY fast and with NO bugs…
As I said earlier, my 1512 was stolen… It was a very sad day for me, but on the other hand, by that time, the computer had become necessary for my dad's work, so we had to replace it immediatelly, and we got to buy a better PC, the Tulip AT compact 2. I'll describe my Tulip later, first I'll say some stuff about some other machines I've got to work on.
Who doesn't know the Commodore 64? A legendary machine, and a great opponent of the CPC. For me, it was never a match for the Amstrad system, even though it had better graphics and music. First of all, it lacked that beautiful three-inch floppy drive on the side J . The standard issue Commodore was shipped with a VERY SLOW cassette recorder. The main reason I disliked the C64 was its TERRIBLE Basic. It had an extremely small set of commands, and almost everything had to be done with peeks and pokes, and using special characters… It was a beautiful machine, from the hardware point of view, with dedicated hardware for sound and graphic management, but for the amateur programmer it was a NIGHTMARE! Of course, you could find a very nice Basic for the C64, Simon's Basic I think it was called, but you'd only do that if you had bought the Commodore's disk drive which cost more than the computer itself! J
Processor: Motorola 6502… Yea, ok… it was a nice processor, but not a Z80 (just being prejudiced here)
Memory: 64 KB. Enough for the (very nice, I must say) games that run on the C64, but still only half the memory of the beautiful CPC
Graphics System: The C64 was true to its name as regards to the colors. J It supported a total of 64 colors of which 32 could be available on screen. Its maximum resolution was kind of low, but then again, you wouldn't buy the C64 for word-processing J . Specialized chips handled sprites and scrolling. It had great graphics, I must admit that…
Sound: Absolutely beautiful, crystal-clear, multi-channel sound… A wonder of technology J
Operating System: Well, Commodore gave nothing with its computer… Not one lousy tape (or floppy). So, you had to compromise with the terrible Commodore Basic… There was one version of CP/M available for the little Commodore but it required the floppy drive, and the 64K were barely enough… But the Commodore owner didn't care about these things, since the C64 was mainly a game machine.
My relationship with the C64:
I didn't get to do serious work with the C64. A friend of mine had one, and many times I got to go over and play with it. We tried to write a phone catalogue program on its Basic (well… mainly, I tried and he watched J ). It was about the hardest thing I had done on a computer J . But of course, we played some great and legendary games on that computer. Who doesn't remember Boulder Dash? There must be millions of Commodore links out there, but here are some I checked out myself:
I also had a brief contact with another top-selling Commodore product, the Amiga:
Yea, yea, I know… A great system, far ahead of its time, with a great OS and GUI, thousands of great games available, high-tech dedicated hardware for graphics and sound… BUT… it was just another game machine, something Commodore was an expert in making.
Processor: Motorola 68000. A great 16-bit processor, with the astonishing number of 32 bits in its address bus. With capabilities of virtual memory and memory paging, it was a small 386, produced at the time of the 8086. It's a shame the best thing the 68000 did on the Amiga was to run Altered Beast's code…
Memory: 512 KB expandable practically to infinity… J
Graphics System: Probably the main advantage of the Amiga against her then opponents, was her great graphics. A dazzling total of 4096 different colors of which 32 could be available at any time. At a special graphics mode, called the HAM, all 4096 colors could be seen at the same time… It was by far the best graphics system on any personal computer of the time. The Amiga users used to laugh with our CGA cards and with good reason I must say. However, history proved them wrong J
Sound: Another of the Amiga's great assets. With 4 digital sound channels, and special sound synthesizing chips, it was the best sound system available for the individual user of the time. A delight to hear… I can't begin to describe my feelings when I was able to listen to Amiga music files (.MOD) from my PC with the ModPlay program sometime in '92 I think.
Operating System: It was probably one of the best OS's around. The Amiga Workbench , and her KickStart (the ROM part of her operating system) was a user-friendly, and yet powerful operating system. It included many utilities to make the life of the user easier, but the pity is that the average Amiga user rarely noticed Workbench's windows. All they wanted to do is play games, and more games, and more games…
My relationship with the Amiga:
Well, as with the C64, it was a friend of mine that had one, and I would go to his house very often to play a few games. I tried to find a programming language somewhere on the disks that came with the computer but… naaahh… It seems Commodore itself wasn't targeting this machine to the programmer J . Of course, by that time, almost no computer came shipped with a programming language. The time that every computer owner was an amateur programmer as well, was long past… L
Eventually, that friend bought a 386/40 , later a 486 and now a Pentium. The Amiga sadly found her way to the top shelf of his closet… L The same happened, I believe, to almost all the Amigas around, and it was the natural way of things for a computer that wasn't compatible even to itself (various KickStart versions were incompatible with each other) and was used only for games. When the game writers turned to the huge PC market, the Amiga just faded away… L
Well, this one was a true PC-compatible… Nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the clones, almost nothing special about it whatsoever. It wore an Intel 80286 processor, running at the incredible speed of 12 MHz J . But, for its time, it was a very powerful computer. It was also of very high quality, unlike most of the clones. It was after all, a Tulip® … not a no-name PC. J
Processor: Intel 80286. The first true 16-bit processor by Intel. A magnificent chip for the time it was designed. It was capable for much more than the existing software used it for… It could support two operating modes. One was the "real" mode, the 8086-compatibility mode. Almost everything written for the 286 ran in real mode. Almost no-one knows, that, like the bigger 386, the 286 also had a protected mode, in which it could address up to 16 MB of memory (24 bit address bus). The segment-offset memory system of the 8086 had started to show its age. However, and for many years after the 286 was introduced, the PC software was idiotically written with the 8086 in mind. Nobody made the decision to stop supporting that poor old chip, even though it had clearly reached the end of its career J That's why we kept using all those silly "tricks" like expanded and extended memory for addressing the above-640K memory even on the 486!!!
Memory: 1 full MB of memory, expandable to 16 MB, or, as we said at that time, 640 K base memory, and 384 extended… L For those of you who don't know it, this "extended" thing, was a software trick to manage to access memory above 640 K without losing the … precious compatibility with the grandpa 8086. If there had been software written specifically for the 286, it could have access to up to 16 MB of flat memory.
Graphics System: My Tulip was equipped with an astonishing VGA card… 256 KB of dedicated graphics memory, enabled it to support the INCREDIBLE resolution of 800x600 pixels (with 16 colors) !! J It could show 256 colors on the 640x400 resolution. The VGA was the first PC graphics card that could stand a comparison with the Amiga's graphic system. And at most cases, the VGA was the winner, except for sprite movement, scrolling, and stuff like that, in which the PC still were behind
Sound: The standard sound system for the Tulip (as with any other PC) was the well-known and hated PC-speaker. It was absolutely awful. I soon bought a sound-card for my AT, a Sound-Blaster compatible. I was ecstatic! At last, there was real voice and real music coming out of my computer!
Operating System: Well… Microsoft had by then already become an empire. With my Tulip came the latest version of its Dos, MS-Dos 4.01. It was a version that solved many of the earlier versions' problems. It provided ways for software to access the extra memory of the 286, and could support "large" hard disks, larger than 40 MB. Also, with my Tulip, came the very popular Windows, version 3.0. It was a graphical user interface for the PC, and version 3.0 was the one that really made the system known to the public. However, the PC processors of the time were still very slow for all the things Bill Gates wanted his Windows to do, and most of us PC-users, preferred the good old Dos prompt.
My relationship with the Tulip AT:
Well, this is the first computer I started to do serious work with. Borland's Turbo Pascal 6.0 (and 7.0 later on) was by far the best programming language for the non-professional programmer, and it ran wonderfully on my 286. It had support for the extra 286 command set and for extended memory, it had a graphical IDE and it was, in part, Object Oriented. It was for me, the best language of its time, and I did many of my best programs with it. It was also the first computer that ran some serious games, and with the Tulip, I had my first networking experience, with a BBS in my hometown. I linked to it using a 2400 bps modem. I still remember the days I used QModem, and my offline Mailer… I remember the tagline collection I had … J Now, with Internet, all these are long past…
The Tulip is still in perfect working condition. I've had absolutely no problem with it during all these years. I still work on it when I go to Katerini, and I still enjoy working with it… J
This one is a clone in every sense of the word. Nothing original about it, nothing with a big fancy name on it, or, better, many things with lots of different names on them. It's the computer I'm now using to write these lines. It's the computer that got me on the Internet, the one that introduced me to the wonderful, "bug-free" Windows '95 J .
I can't believe how much technology has progressed since the days of '88 , when a well-running program on the CPC's Basic was enough to make me happy. I can't believe I can have live video on my monitor, that 16 MB are not enough even for the operating system, that this stupid word processor doesn't let me write QModem, and corrects it to Qmodem, because it thinks that I mistakenly kept the Shift key pressed J
I can't believe that my 16-bit Sound card costs less than a box of floppy disks, that I can listen to MP3 songs with CD-quality, that I can chat with people from Malaysia and South Africa as easily as picking up the telephone (or even more easily… J ). Sometimes, all this progress scares me… I am terrified at the thought that someday everything will be done through the computer, that people who don't know the first thing about them, will be forced to use them in every aspect of their life… I wish things could stay as they were, with computers being a hobby and a tool for few of us, that really knew them.
Processor: Intel Pentium 133. What can I say? This thing is a monster (or better, it was when I bought it). Running at FM radio frequencies, with in-built floating-point coprocessor, true 32-bit memory addressing, in-built cache memory and many - many other stuff that I don't even know…
Graphics System: I tried to keep the graphics card cheap. I was amazed that with the money I was willing to offer, I could buy a graphics card with 2 MB of memory, with a maximum resolution of 1280x1024, giving true 24-bit color at 800x600 and 16-bit color at 1024x768… I couldn't even dream of such a system in my Tulip days.
Sound: I bought a no-name 16-bit sound card for my PC. It performs wonderfully, and I can't understand why people offer so much money to get state-of-the-art 64-bit cards. I really don't think I will ever need any better sound quality than this…
Operating System: Microsoft is now clearly, and will continue to be, I think, the absolute leader in computer software. Any machine that doesn't run Windows, is doomed to fail. The operating system that came installed on my Pentium, was MS-Windows '95. I have mixed feelings about this system. On one hand, it is a beautiful operating system. Easy to use, and yet quite powerful. On the other hand, it IS full of bugs and problems. However, I'm sure that W95 and its later versions will continue to be the basis of the PC for many years yet.
My relationship with the Pentium:
My relationship with my Pentium was more professional than sentimental, as with my earlier machines. However, I'm still getting to know this machine. Many of you may wonder why I never bought a 386 or a 486 and went directly to the Pentium from my Tulip AT. Well, as I have explained in my biography J , when I got off High School, I had almost lost interest at computers… So, I preferred to spend money on more enjoyable things than them. Also, I was kind of frightened by the rate of computer development, and thought that I would never get to work with all those fancy things the PCs had become able to do… I preferred to keep using my old AT. I knew everything about that computer. I knew what every little chip on it did. I had become accustomed with all of its software and had learnt quite well the art of programming in Turbo Pascal 6.0. I was scared to take such a great step towards the Windows machines that seemed so distant to me.
But however, as I'm using my Pentium, I'm starting to think that even today, computers have a lot to offer to the amateur, to the non-professional, to the guy that sees them as a pastime, as a hobby. Delphi is a programming tool that we could not even imagine some years ago, Internet is a new horizon opening up for all of us who want to have some fun with our machine… There are, however, some things that should get us thinking… But that's another story.. J