For those, who haven't left yet.
My father is a software engineer, so there is nothing unusual that we'd got first home computer as soon as was possible. It was in 1990 or 1991, when the Soviet Union still existed, so there were some problems with foreign devices. Our first computer was hand-made ZX Spectrum clone, which was assembled from different foreign and Russian chips by my father's friend. It had rather peculiar hand-made keyboard, and used Kometa-212 tape-recorder for data storage:
, and monochrome TV Kaskad-203 as the display, which looked like this:
I'd just started to play chess in local center for youth creativity and enjoyed playing with this computer very much. I was unable to beat it at that time, since I was only six or seven years old :)
Also I tried to do some programming in built-in Basic, but without much success, since I was unable to save entered program on the tape.
I will try to find and photograph remains of that computer.
It's a pity that couple of years after our old TV ceased to function, so we bought another TV, which was incompatible with computer output.
So for couple of years we had no working computer at home. I should mention, that the beginning of 1990s was rather hard time in Russia, so IBM PCs were to expensive for us. They cost more than $1000, and it was very big money. The average wage at that time was about 50-100 USD a month.
When I was eleven, I started study programming in Palace of Youth Creation. I was taught Turbo Pascal 7.0. So I was really happy when we bought a computer as a New Year gift at the end of 1996.
It was rather good and expensive machine with AMD K5 75 MHz processor, 8 megabytes of RAM, 600 megabytes hard drive and brand new Windows 95 OS and 14" CRT monitor GoldStar 1468.
I still use this monitor, which has rather decent picture quality and 800x600/75Hz resolution.
We also bought a printer HP DeskJet 400, which is really cool, I used it last time just two years ago, when I had no time to buy a cartridge for new printer.
I enjoyed playing Warcraft II and programming in Turbo Pascal. But the OS was a complete disaster, it showed Blue Screen of Death several times a day. May be it was due to the lack of system resources, since OS became more stable when we added 8 more megabytes of RAM a year later, or may be because the system was cracked, not bought legally. As you remember, couple hundreds of bucks were a lot of money in Russia in that time :)
In the end of 1997 we added 8 megs of RAM, sound card, CD-ROM and 1.2 Gb hard drive to our PC. Nevertheless, by the end of 1998 it became completely obsolete.
So we "upgraded" it by replacement of main board, processor, RAM, and hard drive. We used the box of old PC, and also bought new LG Flatron 795FT monitor.
New computer was pretty cool, it was based on AMD K6-2/350Mhz processor, with 64 megs of RAM (128 more megabytes was added a year later), 6 Gb Seagate Medalist hard drive and great USR Courier 56k modem. Modem was really good on our old phone line. We had almost no breaks, but rather slow (33,6k) connection because of old hardware at local exchange.
In 1999 computer section in Palace of Youth Creation switched from DOS/Windows 3.11 to FreeBSD, so I started to study C, C++ and Perl, and installed RedHat Linux 5.2 and later 6.0 and 6.2 on our first hard drive, which was 600 megabytes. It's funny that there were enough space for X11, KDE, XEmacs, LaTeX, kernel sources and so on. I also enjoyed Fallout 2 game.
In the end of the year 2000 we decided that we need new PC, so we bought completely new AMD Athlon XP 1733+ MHz with 256 megs of RAM and 40 Gigs IBM hard drive. We plugged newer LG monitor into new PC, and old GoldStar to older one. So for the first time we had more than one working computer :)
Well, later we added new hard drives to new PC, 512 megabytes of RAM, CD-RW/DVD-RW drives, new Canon PIXMA iP4000 printer, Epson scanner and so on, but that is not very interesting. In the beginning of this year 40 Gb IBM hard drive on older PC failed, so that computer became Linux only box. I installed KUbuntu 7.04 on it and I use it now everyday for software development, and it is rather fast :) It can host Apache, MySQL and PHP, also I do C++ and Python development on it. It even can play Youtube movies :) The only thing that I've done for optimization was the replacement of KDE with Fluxbox.
No comments:
Post a Comment