I was born in rural Northern Ireland in 1972 at the height of the troubles and had a wonderful childhood. Creative with an interest in the world around me I spent most of my early years taking things apart to see how they worked. I started my computer journey in 1980 with the arrival of a Television PONG game one Christmas, I was just 8 years old but was addicted to the machine and soon had squash mastered. The next year I requested a Sinclair ZX81 and got it for Christmas. Much basic coding and gaming followed. In the Christmas of 1982 I got a Commodore 64 with DataPac and for the following five years I used the C64 for everything from gaming to programming, learning machine code and experimenting with an interface that allowed me to create an auto fire joystick from Meccano parts, long before they appeared in the shops.
After a trip to family members in Canada in 1997 I shipped back to the UK one of the first Commodore Amiga A500 computers in the UK and started to fall in love with the Amiga, it always was and still is in my opinion one of the best systems of all time. During the period between 1987 and 1991 I collected over 1500 Amiga Games and helped create the 'scene' of the time. I was a member of several Amiga Groups of the time including RSI and The Untouchables. I also formed my own Amiga Group called ICRUS which had a short but bright life with some demo releases and much spreading.
During 1990 I had also started to play with the Intel 8088 CPU in the form of a Commodore PC1 (one of the few computers I regrettably did not keep in my collection) and increasingly spent more and more time using it to program in Clipper and learn DBase 3 and DBase 4. By 1991 I had purchased my first real IBM Clone. An Intel 80486 DX2-66 with 4MB of memory and a 120MB Hard Disk, it also sported a 1MB VLBus display card and 15" Colour Monitor. It was quite a serious computer and allowed me to code and compile at home for my degree in computing science.
I am also a very serious collector of old computers, consoles and related material and have spent the best part of 20 years collecting and restoring systems and software. I have some very large systems in the collection like DEC VAX and various Dictaphone WP systems and I also have small handheld like Nintendo Game & Watch. Currently my collection is around 250+ Different Systems including computers, consoles, hand held and some prototype machines. My personal favourites are the rare Amiga systems like the A3000T and A4000T as well as the Atari 2600 first production run.
As a collector of old computer systems, In 2003 I created a page called the Computer Collectors Code of Conduct as a guide for other people to follow. If you want you can also link to this static page to show that you also follow the code.
After my degree I started my own computer company in 1993 which I own and run to this day. We supply virtualised environments, servers, IBM and various technologies to customers all over the UK. I still game and enjoy the latest FPS on the PC as well as regular sessions on the Amiga, Dreamcast and other various old consoles.
You can contact me in the forums and send PM's, you might also see me in our dedicated IRC Chat channel from time to time. If you want you can also get me via email, hottrout [hat] theoldcomputer.com. |
