About me - and why?
I started school in 1981, when I was 6 years old. After school, I usually went to Fredgaard, a danish chain store dealing in all things electronic - also computers. In a corner of the store, they had some computers set up for people to try. I remember there being a Commodore 64, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore Plus/4 and later some kind of Sharp-thing with a built-in casette recorder. Nobody really paid much attention to that...
But the Commodores usually had some game running on them. I'm not really sure who loaded them - if it was the employees or other customers. I never saw anyone loading anything - or any discs or tapes lying around for that matter.
Anyway, there I spent most of my afternoons, not leaving before the store closed at 6. Remember, this was a time where mobile phones where few and far between (and the battery, boasting 15 minutes of talk time, were the size of a briefcase), so my parents had no way of getting in touch with me, except coming to the store to get me, which only happened once, as far as I remember.
The first computer
This went on for a couple of years, and finally, the decision was made: I had to have a computer! This was not an easy decision for my parents - about a year earlier, my dad had borrowed a Philips Videopac G7000 and about 15 games for a month from a co-worker, who was going on holiday for a month.
As my parents later revealed, this was a test!
A test to see if my sister and I would get anything done, besides sitting in front of the television, playing. And we did. We actually didn't play very much. We rarely could, as my mom was playing Pacman from the time she came home from work until she went to bed (a few hours after my sister and I). Dinner usually consisted of sandwiches or other things that didn't require much time or work...
But I was happy! "I'm finally getting a Commodore 64!"
Unfortunately, my dad (who were accused of being particularly bright) had also decided that the Commodore 64 had no future, and would die of before the end of the year. Let me remind you: This was the summer of 1983!
No, the future was in the Amstrad CPC 464, which is what he bought me. I got it with the color screen, but for the same money, I could have gotten a C64 with a 1541 floppy drive. But when my dad had decided on something, nothing could make him change his mind - least of all me, who was just a kid.
But at least I had a computer. I started teaching myself BASIC and did some programming, and practically all my money was used for buying games! Good times...
Getting in on the beat - to late
The years past, and in 1989 at age 14, I was... "Confirmed" is the direct translation... It's basically going to church, confirming what others promised on your behalf when you were baptised. The equivalent of what the jews call "bar mitzvah," I believe. The important thing here is: Traditionally, there is then a big party and you get gifts! Most 14-year olds do it for the party, not because they believe in God. I must admit I am in that group.
Among other gifts, I got enough money to buy my own C64 with a casette-deck (or Datasette, as it was called). I never got to tell my dad "I told you so", as he had died from cancer in '85, four weeks before my tenth birthday. But six years to late, I finally got in on the Commodore action!
In the meantime, I had gotten a brother-in-law who was also into computers. Pretty soon after I bought my C64, his broke, and instead of buying a new one, he bought himself an old IBM PC XT, leaving his 1541 disk drive, a bunch of diskettes and his Seikosha printer to me.
But for the next few years, I had fun with the C64. Also did a bit on programming on that, and soon after, my brother-in-law wanted a faster pc, leaving me the XT, if I wanted it.
First PC
I did.
I then learned a new programming language, as he gave it to me with Borland Turbo Pascal 7 installed. I actually started making quite a large and complicated (for me) game, but by the time I was nearly done, Windows 95 came along and swept the market, and noone wanted text-based DOS games anymore. I bet if I saw the code today, I wouldn't understand any of it.
Time passed, and I tried my best to keep up, having a computer that could play at least SOME of the good games. Getting free software wasn't that difficult either, as, back then, there was a public library called DataBiblioteket, or the Data Library. Instead of Danielle Steele books they had computer magazines and a ton of diskettes with shareware, freeware and public domain programmes and games that you could borrow, take home and copy them (completely legal) and then return. I was on a first name basis with everybody who worked there...
First retro pc - before it was retro
Many years later, around 2009, I found a pc in our dumpster room. Not just any pc, but a Pentium 133 MHz CPU, complete with RAM, harddrive and everything. I thought it could be fun playing around with, so I took it, hoping it would work. It did, and I had hours of fun with it.
A few years later, I threw it out - along with all of my old diskettes, expansion cards and everything. All because of a woman! Probably THE biggest mistake of my life. I can still get a bit sad thinking about it...
Fast forward almost a decade, and retro computing had started becoming a thing. My father in law died, and cleaning out his house, I found an old 486 pc, along with a bunch of diskettes, both 3½" and 5 ¼". I immediately wanted to get back into it.
The road there was no longer that easy. And this is where the story of this site started...
