The way of the computer [2]

Those days saw the demise of the homecomputer and the rise of the personal computer and with it the advent of Microsoft Windows. Writing programs for computers became increasingly difficult. The ease with which it was possible to program an MSX computer (even at the assembly level) was replaced by the awful GWBASIC. The joy of programming and of setting a computer to obey your every whim slowly left the domain of the hobbyist.

Then I came across the Acorn Archimedes. With just a megabyte of memory on board and a mere 4 GHz I was amazed by the raw power of the RISC processor. So, I decided to buy me an A310 and enjoyed programming it in BBC BASIC (with built in Assembler mind you). The fun of computer programming was back within my reach again. I had my trusty Acorn re-fitted with 4MB and later upgraded the operating system to RISC OS 2. When RISC OS 3 was released I traded my A310 for an A5000. And some years later stepped up to a RISC PC.

In those days the Internet slowly came into view. Thanks to pioneers like CompuServe e-mail and newsgroups were becoming common. To get on the world wide web, I'd point my browser to www.cern.ch where HTML was born and get surfing from there. I still remember that you could select a country from a list of countries. From there you were taken to the country's "homepage", where you could surf further to sites of schools and service providers. And so on.

Stay tuned. There's more to come.