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0 pointsTheAmazingRace8mo ago0 comments

Blake, I have to say you had to have had a VERY cool childhood growing up with your mom helping you get some then cutting edge tech like that in the mid 80s. I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.

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blakespot8mo ago

Yep, I was lucky. We were a middle-class family and my mom and dad did support my extreme passion in computers. I went through a huge amount of systems.

Here's the list: https://bytecellar.com/the-list

I would buy one, love it, read about another and finally put the first in the newspaper for sale ( https://bytecellar.com/2019/05/08/computer-classifieds-datin... ) and move to the next, with funds added in by my parents to cover the different. I was very lucky in that! (The link shared shows actual scans of the newspaper ads I ran, selling some of the systems back in the '80s.)

TheAmazingRaceOP8mo ago

Thank you for sharing your story and experience Blake. I was born in the late 80s, and my very first introduction to computers was via my dad’s white-box homemade 486 DX/33 PC running MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 (which from what I understand was pretty hot stuff for 1992 when he built it) and I believe we were the only household on our street that had any kind of PC at that point. My dad even dabbled in BBSes of the day and DOS games, in addition to his usual productivity stuff with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.

Sadly, I missed out on the more fun era of computers from the 80s, as PCs became quite the tour-de-force by the time the 90s rolled in. So I made it my mission to procure some classic computers from time to time and use them for awhile before selling them. My current retro system of choice is a modded Atari 520ST with 1 MB of RAM via a Marpet XTRA-RAM expansion.

spankibalt8mo ago

> I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.

Platform studies as an interdisplinary discipline should, and usually does, pay attention to the subtleties of different markets; many an enthusiast's dabblings in history do not, thereby often enough mimicking the sort of Ereignisgeschichte ("event history") from other fields hobbyists gravitate to, e. g. military history.

I, for my part, value Datagubbe's account as an interesting meditation on personal computing realities, and therefore choices, in the Sweden of the late 80s to early 90s.

Sleaker8mo ago

Born in 84 myself, first major introduction to computing was in '89 or '90, my grade school had received about 20 Apple 2e with various edutainment titles.

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