Tony's Retro Page

I've owned a few computers down the years, these have been my main computers from the beginning right up to 2008.

1980(approx) - Atari 2600 Games Console Not strictly a computer but my first experience of computing games was this rather extravagant venture by my Dad. Still own our original console, fully working with a decent collection of games. Fav link: http://www.atari2600.com/
	1983 - Acorn Electron - or the Elk as it's fondly known. This was bought as our family computer but quickly turned out to be 'my computer' as the rest of the family feared its presence in the corner of the room. A good machine to compliment the BBC Micros we used in schools at the time. Despite playing (and swapping) lots of games I still experienced my first taste of programming back on the Elk. I remember being envious of the Spectrum (for all the games releases), despite it's comparatively small price tag and poor hardware! I still own two Electrons and a Plus 1 interface. Fav link: http://www.stairwaytohell.com/
1987 - Amstrad CPC 6128 This seemed a big upgrade to a computer with CP/M and a built in floppy drive. As it happened the Electron weren't half bad (built in assembler & BBC Basic for example) but the CPC is where I learnt to program properly. Ran a PD library on the CPC for a couple of years. Currently have a working CPC6128 and a CPC464. Fav site: http://www.cpczone.net/
	1991 - Commodore Amiga 500 / 600 Finally made the move to 16 bit - firstly a troubled Amiga 500 that broke down twice in 12 months, and then a 600. The 600 was the smallest Amiga, featured PCMCIA and was handy to stuff in a ruck sack. Upgrades included more memory, an RGB monitor and hard drive. While at university I managed to transfer files with DOS formatted low density disks using a file transfer program. I got by but I knew PCs were beckoning. This was my last computer non-Windows PC as my main computer... fav site: http://www.amiga.org/
1996 - Intel 486 DX4 66Mhz / Win95 A quite unremarkable looking computer - it was self built but with a miserable 16Mb Ram and 2 speed CD-Rom drive. Despite this it was a big step forward and overdue since I had been using PCs at uni for a few years!	1998 - Intel Pentium 1 120Mhz / Win98 Another step up in processing power but an unmemorable beige desktop design I obtained second hand.
2000 - Intel Celeron 466 / Win 2K Custom built from new... my sister was still using this computer up until very recently, now up in a loft out of service.
	2002 - AMD Athlon 1600+ / Win XP Under went several upgrades including Win 2K to XP. Generally reliable and my main computer until I had a laptop with more juice. Eventually dismantled for parts and other machines.
2005 to present - Dell Inspiron 6000 / Win XP A mid range laptop still functioning as my main laptop after some key upgrades to memory (2GB) and bigger hard disk. Other than XP I'm running several retro emulations, Amiga OS plus Windows Server 2003 & Vista evaluation virtual machines.

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