I've been interested in computers from the day i was born, i guess.
It all started with my first computer, a Philips VG 8230. This was a MSX2 computer
with 64kB RAM, 128kB VRAM, and a 360kB 3,5" floppy disk drive. Everyone i knew those
days, was busy copying games from eachother, but that never interested me.
I was more interested in why you had to switch source- and destination disk so often
to copy a 360 kB floppy disk. I mean, this thing had 128 kB VRAM onboard, why wasn't
it used in the copy-process i thought? So i got me an assembler written in MSX-Basic,
learned Z-80 assembly, and wrote my first program...and brought changing disks back
to 3 times instead of 6 or 7! (don't know exactly anymore).
That's better... from that time on i was hooked to writing software.
Later on i got a Pascal compiler on a cartridge for the MSX, followed by Borland
Turbo Pascal 3.
Next came a NEC V-20 based Tulip PC Compact 2 with (i think it was) MS-DOS 3.3 and Windows
1.03.
Programming was done with MASM, TASM, Turbo Pascal, QuickBasic.
The hours that 've spent on that machine...unbelievable !
With a 1200 bps modem i visited lots of BBS's focussing on programming very frequently
and downloaded anything i thought was worth downloading in order to improve my knowledge
not only about programming but also about PC hardware.
After that i owned an Intel 75 Mhz (Zappa), Intel PII 333 MHZ, AMD ATHLON 1200 MHz
(Thunderbird), and currently i'm sitting behind a Intel 3,2 GHz P4 (Prescott). Harddisks
were always loaded with programming languages like Assembler, Basic and Pascal.
I never was attracted to C/C++. I don't really know why, but it just wasn't my thing.
I did do some things with Borland Turbo C++, but it just wasn't my thing... and
regarding games: well, windows had a couple onboard like Minesweeper, Pinball...that
was enough for me.
Another big hobby in my early (15-25) years was building RC boats. I've built 4
of them during the years. Keep in mind that building these boats is not sometinhg
that can be done overnight; for example, the Billing Boats "Smit Rotterdam", the
second boat i built, took me 2.5 years...
Besides programming and building RC boats there's one other hobby that's PC-related: digital imaging.Well,
actually digitizing images and video. I have a Panasonic DV camera and a Nikon DSLR.
And i have a Minolta Scan Dual with which i can scan photo negatives and slides.
For digitizing video i have a Datavideo DAC-100 which can convert analog video (VHS,
Video-8 etc) to DV. Currently my "library" contains nearly 12000 images being
scanned negatives, slides and images from my digital photo camera. The oldest images
are from 1970, when i was 3 years old...