Lonewolf Online

My history with computers

 

I suppose so! It all started back when I was about 9 or 10 when I started using the RM Nimbus at school. These were made by Research Machines and were aimed at the educational market. No idea of what model or the specs, but it was basic.

Shortly after I moved 'up' to the BBC Micro. I could use this during lunch breaks when it was raining outside. Mostly I messed around with a few games, but occasionally I would use it to cheat on homework! Why bother working out things on a calculator when I can get a computer to do it for me... in batch? and so I started down the dark path of a computer programmer...

It wasn't long before I had written a simple adventure game (ala Zork I), albeit very basic (no pun intended!)

 

Atari ST

At home, my dad let me have his old Atari ST when he upgraded to an Amiga 500 and Acorn Archimedes.

I wrote a few good games on the Atari with the SEUCK (Shoot em up construction kit)

The Atari was also good at multimedia, I could plug a musical keyboard in the back and have hours of synthesised musical fun!

Some of the best games I ever played were on the old Atari - Arkanoid: Revenge of Doh, Dizzy, Dungeon Master, Knightmare, Lemmings, Shufflepuck Cafe, Sidewinder, Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe and North vs South to name a few.

After a few good years the old Atari was replaced by my dads old Amiga when he bought a PC.

 

Amiga 500

The Amiga 500 was where it all started for me. It was the first computer that I had a colour screen with. I also had TWO floppy drives!

Programming really took off when I got the AMOS Pro programming language. It had a really easy to use interface and had all the tools like sprite editors and sound editors. Got my first games programming book for AMOS. Lots more cracking games on the Amiga: Shadow of the Beast, Clown-o-mania, K240, Alien Breed.. the list is almost endless.

I had the Amiga, probably for longer than any other single computer.

 

Personal Computer

In the mid 90's, around 1995 I think, I reluctantly sold the Amiga in favour of a 486 DX2/66 PC. At the time it seemed like going backwards. The games on the PC were limited to 16 colour (256 on the Amiga) and sound was via a bleeper (FM synthesised on the Amiga).

Windows 3.11 was the best desktop I had seen (Atari GEM and Amiga Workbench the others), and games programming soon took off with Klick'n'Play. It wasn't long before I got hooked on Doom and I've been on hooked on the PC ever since.

Shortly after I got a PC, the PC games scene exploded. Doom 2 and Heretic followed Doom, Decent and Duke Nukem 3D followed after. Carmageddon was played for a long time as well. Quake was a ground breaking game that made me upgrade my 486 to a Pentium P90, and with that came Windows 95.

Throughout this time I was always trying different tweaks on the systems to get the most performance out of them, because at this time the games were ahead of the hardware, and any new hardware was very expensive.  £300 for a 250MB hard drive!!! Couple of tweaks could speed up windows load times by up to 30 seconds and every little piece of memory counted (all 640K of it!!!)

These days the hardware is so far in advance of the games out that there is little point in tweaking the systems. We have all the memory we could possible have use for, were not limited to 640k. Hardware is so fast that even a major tweak to windows will only save a few microseconds of loading - its not worth the effort. I still enjoy modding though... not content with a dull grey box, its all about the looks and bragging rights now.

You can read and see pictures of my current computers here

Education

I took Information Technology as a GCSE in school, followed by an Integrated Business Technology stage 2 course, then in 2002 I was awarded a HND in Software Engineering from Plymouth University. Between 2003 and 2006 I worked as an AS400 Operations Analyst for a large clothing manufacturer, since then I have been a Web developer and eProcurement programmer within the same company. I am currently studying to become a Microsoft Certified Solution Develper (MCSD).