Sunday, December 6, 2009

1989 - 1992: Commodore 64

It is difficult for me to recall my memories as a baby/toddler, but what i do vaguely remember, is the presence of the Commodore 64 in the household.

The Commodore 64 was introduced on the market by IBM 7 years prior to my year of birth, which led me to think that my parents owned this predecessor of the current high-tech computer far before the time i was just a twinkling in my father's eyes.



My father sometimes would put me on his lap and all i could remember was staring attentively at this blue screen with text. The Commodore 64 which could be described as the first home-user-friendly personal computer that was made, had as its name already suggests, just 64 kilobytes of memory. Nowadays an average computer has an internal storage of 2 GB of memory, what amounts to
2097152 kilobytes. While the use of the Commodore 64 during that time was limited to office use and playing 64-bit games. My father would use it for word processing, he would sometimes put me behind it to play games (under supervision ofcourse, it would not be sensible to leave a baby alone with such a valuable piece of technology).

I didn't get to spend much time behind the Commodore 64 at this age, but every waking moment i was pre-occupied with playing games. An activity that i enjoyed from an early age on, whether i was just randomly pressing some buttons, i really was a fanatic in randomly pressing buttons while drooling over the keyboard. Something i still tend to do nowadays when playing videogames. In that sense i'm still a baby.

Spellbound; a Commodore 64 game released in 1985

I still own that same Commodore 64, it is somewhere accurately hidden in the confines of a dusty box in the attic. I hope it still works, maybe I should try to see. Oh, the good old days.

What technological innovations occured between 1989 and 1992?

1989:
  • The first of 24 satellites of the Global Positioning System is placed into orbit
  • Nintendo begin selling the Game Boy in Japan
  • The 486 series of microprocessor introduced by Intel.
1990:
  • Tim Berners-Lee publishes a more formal proposal for the World Wide Web and the first web page is written
  • Microsoft Releases Windows 3.0
  • A 16 megabit chip is shown for the first time
1991:
  • Internet is made available to unrestricted commercial use and number of computers on the net reaches 1 million
  • Microsoft Releases MS Dos 5.0
1992:
  • AT & T release video telephone for $1,499
  • The first Nicotene patch is introduced to help stop smoking
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What technological equipment do you still own from this period?

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