Arstechica published an interesting article about history of personal computer market. When reading it, I actually recalled the computers I owned in my life.

The first time I was able to touch a computer was in 1984 (I was 11 years old at that time). My dad has a friend, who bought Sinclair ZX Spectrum and I spent a whole afternoon with it. Later, my dad borrowed this computer, so we had it at home for a week - I think this week was the point I realized I would like to become computer engineer or something like this.

In 1986, I got my first computer - Atari 800 XL with a tape recorder. It was amazing machine, I started to learn Basic and moved later to 6502 assembler. I also remember a special language available only on that machine called Action!, which was very fast (compared to basic). I basically lived with this computer through the whole high school. I really loved this machine and I still think it was a 8-bit computer with perhaps the best hardware architecture at the market. Getting 256 colors on the screen or smoothly scrolling screens - do you remember how easy it was to do?

In 1987 I went to high school and I saw a PC compatible computer for the first time and learned Pascal (using TurboPascal 5.0). I remember one of my projects - I wrote a simple windowing system for text modes (perhaps I could find a 5.25" floppy disk with this project somewhere ). On a high school a friend of mine bought Amiga 500 - a very powerfull machine with amazing graphics and sound capabilities. PCs at that time were quite unusable machines compared to it.

After finishing the high school I already knew I wanted to be a software professional and I went to the university to study computer science. I sold Atari machine to one of my dad's friends (who wanted it for kids to play games) and was without a computer for some time - it was ok, because I was using computes in university labs - usually y PCs running MS-DOS, later also Windows 3.1. In 1993 I bought Amiga 1200 with 2 megs of memory , 14Mhz 68020 processor, 120 megabytes harddrive and 14" color monitor. I later upgraded memory and processor to 6 MB and 28Mhz68020. I learned C, C++, 68000 assembly, c-shell scripting, LISP and many other stuff on it. The only thing I missed on that machine was that I coudn't play Doom . I still have this amazing machine in a box and perhaps I should start it up and try to boot. The last time I run it, it was actually three years ago, and it was still working perfectly - it even survived Y2K - I haven't noticed any problems with it .

At the university I also had a chance to work on real unix machines - besides some DEC servers, I was using Sun Sparcstation 5 and SGI Indy. I somehow liked the SGI machine more - it was a bit faster and its windowing system called 4DWM was simply nicer (sorry openlook designers ). I remember compiling some open source window managers (CTWM and Bowman (AKA Afterstep) for the sparcs. I also remember downlading and learning the first version of Java for the sparcstation - at that time I never thought I will work for Sun in the future . Anyway I finished university in 1996 and did my diploma thesis in Visual C++ 2.0 on Windows NT 3.5 (I was forced to use it - I was dealing with using OpenGL in Win32 environment, I would had choosen SGI Indy instead ) running on noname 75Mhz Pentium PC.

At that time it was quite clear my Amiga is not able to help me much with advancing in my career, so in 1998 I assembled my own PC - AMD K6 @ 300 Mhz, 192MB of memory, 6GB harddrive, graphics card with NVidia Riva 128 3D accelerator and Soundblaster Live. Not a bad machine for that time and it is still being used today - my wife's parents are using it everyday to browse the internet and send emails (I'm quite surprised it is still usable ). In 1999 I also somehow got an old Sparcstation 10 (nobody wanted to use it anymore) - it had 112MB of memory and external harddrive, so I installed Solaris 2.6, Oracle database and Tomcat and used to run as a webserver which was simply getting data from the database and published it on the web . I think for a machine from 1992 it was quite amazing it was able to run up-to-date software 7 years later.

This blog I'm typing on a PC which I assembled four years ago - Athlon XP 1700+, 1GB of memory, Geforce 2 GTS graphics and 40 MB harddrive. It's quite amazing to look backwards in the history - how the computer industry has changed in the last 20 years. I'm really wondering how it is going to evolve in the next 20 years.