Since 1982, I've been enjoying a (purely platonic) love affair with the world of computers, when my beady eyes landed on the BBC Micro that they had at school... I got every chance I could to play with the thing, and even learned how to do some rudimentary programming in the wonder language, BASIC. In the next year of school, I used to race through my lessons so that I could get time to use the thing, and I have to say that I came close to losing my long-standing friendship with John Croucher (see All About Me) as a result of my suddenly anti-social behaviour. Fortunately, I got myself straightened out behaviourally, but I'm still as addicted to computers as ever I was.
What I own right now
I have no less than four computers, greedy little gadget fiend that I am, and they are:
Other Stuf
Of course, as far as the PCs are concerned, I have all manner of things hanging off the back of them, or stuffed inside them:
What I do with them
OK, I play games - I'm only hooman (it says 'ere), but I do do other stuff too - I use my machines to write my poetry, and for the Internet (I knew there was a reason I had two modems :) ), and I even like to program on them (the Psion uses a version of BASIC** called OPL - Organiser Programming language; and I'm itching to get Visual BASIC 6.0 for the PC)
Computers I used to own
First up was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Oh, for the halcyon days of attribute clash, "R: Tape loading error", and rubbery keys (except the ZX Spectrum +) which was ideal for typing with your nose, although you had to enlist a friend for CAPS SHIFT and SYMBOL SHIFT - don't ask :) ). The great thing about 8-bit machines (not just the Spectrum) is that programmers pushed them to their limits, and sometimes beyond. You don't often get that sort of thing now, oooh no - not now you can effectively make people buy upgrades - or even new machines - just so they can run your programs at more than a crawl... Sorry, I got carried away, there.
Then there came an Acorn Electron; not a fantastic machine, but given that I bought the thing from a car-boot sale for only £13, I wasn't complaining :) Of course, by now I'd got used to having disks (because of using the BBC at school) rather than tapes, so I spent a further £80 on a disk drive for it...
Shortly after that, in July 1991, I bought the Commodore Amiga 500, and boy, do I miss the thing. Now therewas a 16-bit machine worth having (although playing colour-dependent two-player Lemmings on the machine using a black-and-white TV set boggles the imagination!). I splashed out for a (monochrome) inkjet printer, a 120 Mb hard disk with integral 4 Mb extra RAM, and AMOS Professional (yes, another BASIC variant, but a bloody powerful one at that). Why do I no longer have this paragon of computing power? Well, I thought I was emigrating to America, and so I had to sell off my stuff. So my Amiga is no longer here, but I am. There's no justice.
Briefly, an Atari 520ST with 512K RAM and dodgy disk drive. Nuff said.
An AST Bravo LC5133, with Intel Pentium 133 MHz processor, 16 Mb RAM (later expanded to 48 Mb), SiS 6205 graphics adaptor, Vibra16X soundcard, and no modem. When I bought this (in May 1998), I knew much less about computers than I thought I did, and so I rushed into purchasing this beastie for 600 Earth pounds. It wass an OK machine, but the shared-memory BIOS was a real pain, and there was a lot of swap-file usage when the machine only had 16 Mb of RAM.
A Hewlett Packard Pavilion 4420, with Intel Celeron 366MHz processor, 32 Mb of RAM, ATI Rage IIC graphics card, 32x CD-ROM, Rockwell Riptide sound card, and Rockwell internal modem. Basically, I was getting a little tired of the speed loss of the AST machine (see above), because of the low memory causing mucho hard-disk thrashing. A later addition was an Iomega Zip 100 drive, but it rapidly became redundant thanks to the CD writer.
* Note: Although that might not sound like much to someone who's not familiar with Psions, let me tell you that it's very good; the operating system is arranged so that an active program, plus its variables and other data, can only occupy a maximum of 64K (this excludes sound files, which are streamed, and possibly databases), so you can cram a heck of a lot into that 2 Mb.
** OK, so I can only program in BASIC. I don't care. Although I must admit that I'd like to learn C++, Java, and maybe Delphi (I have a little rudimentary PASCAL under my belt - it hides behind the buckle).