The Beginning
It all started back in the eighties... My parents wished the best for me and bought me a computer for Christmas. The legendry TI99-4A. A great little 8-bit machine with a Motorola 6502 processor and 16k of RAM.
The BASIC cartridge was included and I even had an audio cassette drive for storing data! I wrote some games in BASIC and within a year graduated to assembly language. I still have some old graph paper on which I did the conversion of pixels penciled into a grid to hexadecimal. CALL CHAR() anyone?
8 Bits
After the TI's influence in the home PC market began to wane, I moved onto my second personal computer. The ever stylish Atari 1200XL.
XL because it weighed about 30 pounds I guess. The Atari had same Motorola 6502 microprocessor, so transitioning to this new platform was easy. The Atari's 620k disk storage system was monstrous as was the 64k of RAM. I'll never run out of memory!
This system introduced me to the world of bulletin board systems. I co-wrote and administered on a BBS in the Philadelphia area for many years. With the number of 'messages' we had on our BBS, I soon needed to upgrade to an Atari 130xe which cam stock the 128K of RAM (+2k of rom = 130 ). With some memory chips,a few pieces of wire, and some luck, I built an Atari 258xe which I still own and is fully functional today.
The 16 bit revolution was next !
The Atari ST 1024 was a system I owned for a short period of time. The GEM operating system was poorly documented and difficult to program. I soon realized the world was actually controlled by the clones and bought my first IBM clone.
Apparently one crazy individual keeping it alive here @ www.atari.st »Windows to today
I have owned a series of Microsoft Windows machines since Windows 3.1. I first learned C+ and 8088 Assembly language on a x386 with true color VGA! I have since continued to build various processor / graphic card configurations to feed Windows's ever increasing resource demands.
My current system is an Intel i7 with 64 gigs of RAM, two SSD's and an AMD R9 graphics card running three displays one of which is an UltraHD display. The past few years of part-time video editing has exposed me to the OSX and the usage and maintenance of a 8-Terabyte SAN, which is a nice way to work in groups with video.