In 1986 I started into the 8-bit world. It's Commodore 64 vs. Atari 800. Atari was cheaper and I got an Atari 800XE system (6502 CPU at 1.8 Mhz, 64KB RAM) running ATARI-DOS and BASIC. At school we had 8086 clones running CP/M.
In 1989, the battle is on again the 16-bit front. I switched sides getting a Commodore Amiga (512 MB RAM, Motorola 68000 CPU) running AmigaOS and Kickstart 1.3. My first printer would follow, a 24-needle printer from NEC.
In 1992 the Intel PC world won me over into the 32-bit world with a 66MHz 486 (8MB RAM, 210 MB HDD) Tower and Windows 3.1. It soon got a 2x CDROM drive and a Roland MIDI sound card together with Steinbergs Cubase. Rock'n Roll, Baby!!! (Windows 3.11 example screenshoot)
When I went into the UNIX world in the fall of 1994, I got DLD Linux 1.3 (kernel 1.1.3) and I run Solaris 2.4 for Intel. The tower PC got a new VL-Motherboard, additional 16 MB RAM (24MB total) and a second HDD for dual-booting. My school workstation was a HP Apollo running HPUX 8.0 and we had an Intel 386-based SINIX UNIX system. The first browser was Mosaic and the web server from CERN.
1995 brought Windows95 and I bought the upgrade rather late. At work we run Solaris 2.5.1 and I managed Slackware, Debian and Windows NT (DEC Alpha). DEC brought us into the 64-bit world with its Alpha Workstations, kicking Intels butt.
Solaris 2.6 came around both at work and home for x86. My desk workstation was a Multia with the Alpha CPU from DEC, later to be replaced with a IBM RS6000 running AIX. I got to know Digital Unix and Ultrix while I never got the hang of VMS.
In 1998 I got a Hewlett Packard B180L workstation at work, running HPUX 10.20. It was a robust, but incredible slow system. I was glad I also had bigger SUN's around with Solaris 8. (HP-UX 10.20 screenshot on a B180L)
A new Intel PC bought in 2000 for home came with Windows98 and had a 650 MHz Intel CPU (128 MB RAM, 20GB HDD). I dual-booted Solaris 8 after the ATI Rage128 graphics card was supported. (Windows98 example screenshoot)
Work brought Windows 2000 around (both on servers, workstations and even the laptop) and was appreciated to replace the old NT, although CodeRed, Nimda and Slammer would soon ruin it's name again. I switched permanently to Linux on the desktop with Suse 8.0 Professional. (Windows 2000 example screenshoot)
In 2002 I build a new PC from scratch and got the Windows XP upgrade. Sick of dual-booting, I bought VMWare were I could run Solaris and Linux. At work I run Suse Linux 8 and later 9 exclusively. No dualboot (and no viruses either), but some pain with Linux printing. (Suse 9.0 Professional example screenshoot)
In fond memories of my beginnings in the UNIX world, I was getting a cute small SUN Sparc Classic in 2003. I managed to run Solaris 9 on it quite well, despite the age of the machine. See also the
article here. (Solaris 9 example screenshoot)
In 2004, I bought my first laptop ever, an HP with Windows XP installed. Finally 64-bit at home with the AMD CPU, but besides Linux there is no other 64-bit OS out so the installed Windows XP is 32-bit only.
It is 2007 and moving to Japan meant buying a new computer. Everything is smaller here so I choose the Mac Mini, trying out
OSX. Although OSX is nice, I came back to running Windows Vista, which works better for me after I disabled all the useless eyecandy. I am thankful for the increased screen resolution, being now 1680x1050.
