This year marks the 40th year of my life with computers. 🎂 Like for so many others, my journey began back in 1986 with Commodore 64. What a journey it has been!
Commodore 64
As an eight years old boy, all I did with C64 was to learn how to play games, until soon enough I got my hands on MikroBitti computer magazine. I had absolutely no idea what I was reading, but I knew it was extremely fascinating. The magazine also had C64 BASIC programs, spanning multiple magazine pages. Typing all those required some stamina, especially as my typing speed was far from what it has been for the past few decades. Here's an example program from the magazine: imagine manually copy-pasting this from paper magazine to your 40x20 characters screen. One typo and it did not work. No syntax highlighting. Just look at that photo of C64 above and marvel its user interface. That was where you typed the code.
Without floppy drive, even reliably saving it could be a hit-and-miss as those cassette drives were not the best thing around.
My C64 had only the cassette drive, but later I got Load-IT cassette drive which made loading the tapes more reliable with its Knight Rider K.I.T.T: style red indicator. Even more later, I got an 1541-II floppy drive for my C64, making things even more awesome.
Then my neighbor got something else and I needed it too.
Commodore Amiga 500
My memory is a bit hazy, but I would say that around 1990 I got an Amiga 500. Oh boy how Amiga blew my mind. Speech synthesizer. Crisp-clear sampled sounds. Multitasking. 4096 simultaneous colors with HAM (Hold-and-Modify) at 320x256, or 640x512 (bit more than that with Overscan) eye-hurting interlaced resolution. 880 kilobytes floppy drive.
Over the years, my Amiga also got some extra hardware (GVP SCSI interface and a whopping 52 MB hard drive, more FAST RAM, MIDI interface, SupraTurbo 28 CPU accelerator which ran 68000 at 28 MHz frequency instead of 7.14 MHz). Amiga gave me my first touch to programming. Yes on C64 I typed those BASIC listings but on Amiga I learned so much more with AmigaDOS scripts, AmigaBasic, AMOS game maker, to name a few.
Commodore Amiga 1200
Then around mid-90's I got an Amiga 1200 with 68060/50 MHz CPU, 16 MB RAM and 2.5 GB disk. I still have that A1200 at my parents place with a signature from Amiga International's Petro Tyschtschenko -- he visited Saku '98 event in Finland. I was a co-organizer of that event and had my Amiga at the event with me and Petro signed my Amiga's bottom. That Amiga also got some hardware expansions ranging from more disk to a modem to a Ethernet connection and a tower with CyberVision 64/3D graphics accelerator.
ARexx -- a scripting language that arrived with AmigaOS 2.0 and later, was a very handy and fascinating tool. It allowed controlling another program from some other program; for example, after a 3D renderer was done, ARexx could then instruct to launch an image manipulation program such as ImageFX for merging the individual frames, adding additional effects or something similar.
I installed my first Linux around 1997 -- I got a small few hundreds meg hard drive to add to my Amiga, and used that spare disk for installing Debian/m68k on it. I also tried out NetBSD, but it used to deadlock when attempting to use a PCMCIA interface connected Ethernet connection. Debian worked much better. On Amiga side of things, I player around with ShapeShifter to run Mac operating system of that era, I think it was System 7 or System 8. For random MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 stuff, I had PC-Task but its emulation speed was not very optimal.
I did run my own BBS with Amiga's CNet BBS software, but much more importantly, the modem took me to MikroBitti magazines' BBS, MBnet. It was the biggest BBS in the world with one thousand nodes PCBoard license. I started as a regular user, but soon enough found out myself as a chat moderator, Amiga software file operator, and in 1999 I joined MikroBitti magazine as a helpdesk dude.
Entering PC era
Around that time I got my first own hardware-based PC. Old yet still useful MBnet BBS nodes got replaced with newer hardware, so I took a Pentium 1 90 MHz with maybe 32 MB RAM with me and installed Red Hat 5.2 (that was before Red Hat the company did split to RHEL/Fedora setup) on it.
Oh boy, after getting used to Amiga's plug-and-play, on PC guessing all those IRQs and DMAs was anti-fun, but in the end rewarding, and for many tasks Linux sure was faster and far more reliable than AmigaOS which lacked proper memory management.
In 2001, I became a Linux admin in MBnet, as MikroBitti offered email and homepage space for the magazine subscribers for free. 50 MB of e-mail and 50 MB of space for home pages with PHP support was a nice addition and much loved service we offered. I was the evil mastermind behind that setup, and over the years scaled from a single(!) server to many more servers. That role, along with some other hats during my MikroBitti/Sanoma career kept me busy for nearly 15 years.
I'll cut this here as I mostly wanted to tell you today about how I got started with computers. Maybe I'll write chapter two one day.
Images were downloaded from Wikipedia, apart from cover image which ChatGPT made for me.
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