My first computer was a Commodore 64

My first computer was a Commodore 64, the original type, that I got at about the age of twelve for Christmas and connected to the family television.

I think it was second hand and it came with a tape drive and a few games. I recall Attack of the Mutant Camels, Gridrunner and Mindshadow, and there may have been more.

The other thing it had was a faulty SID chip, which resulted in some audio issues, but I didn't really know that the audio wasn't normal until it went in for repair some years later.

I bought a few games (or probably got them as presents). I remember really wanting Pitstop II and having to wait something like thirty minutes to load when I finally got it and played it for the first time.

Many other games were obtained through friends and double cassette decks.

I guess I must have got a disk drive at some point and we later bought a brand-new Commodore dot matrix printer too.

I learnt BASIC programming on it and wrote many useless programs on it, some of which were published in an electronic magazine from a printout that you could send in.

I never managed to learn how to write machine language. The basic concepts just never sunk in and I gave up on learning several times.

I did experiment with hardware. One project was making an accelerator and brake pedal that would work with a joystick to use with driving games. I also remember trying to make modems out of two telephones where one person saves and the other loads at the same time -- no surprise that didn't work.

At some point I got a Plus/4. One of the department stores was selling them off cheap and I am pretty sure it came with a monochrome monitor.

I don't remember much of my time with the Plus/4 but I do remember that the game Kickstart (Kickstart 2 maybe) was a favourite.

I moved on to Amigas in the later 1980s. My first one was an A1000 which I purchased from someone far away and sent them a cheque. A week or so later I received an A1000 and monitor with some software via the post.

I remember less about my Amigas but I know I later had an A500, A600HD and an A2000. The A600 was a bit of an impulse buy after playing Microprose Golf at a computer show, and the A2000 was purchased partly to use with bulletin boards (BBS). I did a bit of gaming and dabbled in a little Amiga BASIC. I wasn't good at graphics or music but tried a little of both, plus some video, as the Amiga made it relatively easy.

I also had a second A1000. I always admired the looks of the A1000 so at some point I decided to build my ultimate Amiga and got an A1000 to which I fitted an Australian Kickstart ROM kit and then connected an A590 circuit board internally with a hard drive also mounted internally. Doing this required that ribbon cable be soldered between the A1000 circuit board and the A590 board, which was a slow and painstaking process that amazingly worked first time.

After Amigas came PCs, although I don't recall which generation I started on -- it could have been the 8088 or maybe the 80386 days.

I did quite a bit of dBase III and IV programming and later I started on Visual Basic 4 which was a revelation compared to previous BASIC languages.

PCs came and went and I learnt to program in various languages. I recall writing a C program to measure the acceleration of a car with a magnetic wheel sensor.

I also wrote a "live" share trading program that worked by scraping data from a broking website.

I later started to write websites, which I first did in Visual Basic 4, later Classic ASP, and even later ASP.NET.