MacBore's Computer Chronology. Part 1

As a reader of this blog, you may be sitting there thinking 'what made MacBore the way he is?' or ''what computers did MacBore use before Macs?'. In reality you're probably pondering over something much more important but I'm going to answer those questions whether you like it or not.

My first computer: The Commodore 64

The C64 is still the best selling personal computer of all time. The 64 stood for the ammount of kilobytes of RAM it had. I think it was a 14th birthday present, bought from Dixons. It came with a few free games (on cassette tape, naturally) that included Mr Wimpy: The Hamburger Game. If you're too young to know, Wimpy was the once the only burger restaurant chain in the UK. My local Wimpy was opposite the Wilco in Nuneaton. I digress. Many a Quickshot joystick was knackered-in playing Daley Thompson's Decathelon. In fact, a whole summer holiday was lost being due to drug-dealing, fugitive action playing Elite. My old C64 is kicking around somewhere at my mum's, minus the 6 key.




Second, and First Non-Home, Computer: Linotype CRTronic.

During my time at Art College I spent months of my life learning how to program this beast. And when I say program, I really do mean program. The CRTronic was a typesetting computer with a black and green CRT monitor. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) hadn't been thought up yet so you spent hours coding each word of type without seeing it. To see your work you had to process it like a photograph. So you really had to get your points and picas right first time around. You should see the printer...
Just after I had spent months typesetting and Cow-gumming together the artwork for the end of year fashion show booklet, my tutor, Ken Ward showed me the design course's new purchase; two Apple Macintosh SEs and a LaserWriter. It suddenly dawned on me that the last 6 months of CRTronic-ing was a complete waste of time.