Computing, gaming and me
How it all began!
It all began sometime in the year 1984, when I as a child of a divorced couple spent the weekends at my fathers house and the rest of the week at my mothers. One weekend my father brought home two programming manuals for the Luxor ABC 80. As I was a 11 year old with a big interrest in reading, I started to read the manuals. I found them intriguing and read them cover to cover in a couple of weekends. The books left me wanting more, so my father waited a month or two, then he brought home a ABC 80 with a dual disk drive. (Yes, I still have that computer)
I couldn't wait, I turned on the computer and started to write my first computer program ever. A slight variation of the infamous "Hello World" program. After that I was hooked, I spent several hours every weekend programming this wonderful machine. Me and a friend actually wrote some games for that machine, mostly simple games in text mode but we also made a couple of graphic action games. Well, graphic... The ABC 80 isn't really famous for its great graphics, but we managed to make some nice games.
When I wasn't coding I played some games on the ABC 80. Masken, Glipp (a rather nice Pac Man clone) and Luftvärn was the favourites.
Then one day another friend got a computer, a Commodore 64 with a datasette. He showed me two games "Attack of the mutant camels" and "Motor Mania". Now I realized that my computer wasn't the best computer in the world, or at least didn't have the best graphics. So I started to hang out at my friends place to play games and code simple things on his computer.
Somehow I later managed to convince my grandparents that I needed a computer at my mothers too. So early in 1986 they bought me a Commodore 128 with a datasette. I used it for about a year, playing and programming it, before I sold it to buy another used Commodore 128 with a disk drive. This one I had for another year and a half, then I sold it to buy the mighty Commodore 128D with an internal diskdrive. While most of my friends slowly moved on to Amigas I kept my 128D, until 1991 when I got my first PC, a Victor 80286. I sold my 128D in 1992, and now I regret it. Not so much the computer as the programs I'd written and the magazines I bought.
After the Victor I've had several PC:s, mostly Compaqs. I've had PCs with the following processors: 80386sx, 80486sx, 80486dx, 80486dx4, Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III and finally now I'm using a AMD Athlon
Collecting
The whole collecting idea came to me in 2002 when I was given a Luxor ABC 800M. I played with it, and liked it. But when we were moving to another appartment I didn't want to carry it (it weighed quite a bit). So I answered an ad in the paper, where a guy in my town wanted old computers. He wanted my ABC 800 and I delivered it. Then I entered his computer room I saw his collection and this was the moment I started collecting old computers.
At first I only wanted Commodore machines, but as time passed by, I realised that there were other nice computers in the world. Then I found eBay and Tradera (a swedish auction site now owned by eBay). What a place to shop for old computers, accessories and software for them.
Now I have three main areas for my collection: Old Computer hardware, old development tools and old computer litterature.
Lately I've come to only collect boxed computers, unless it's a uncommon model of computer.