Crystal Hammer

⏱️Overview

So, this is the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word had 2 bytes.

This was my first computer, an Amstrad produced IBM compatible PC XT, PC 1640. It fits well because it had a 8086 processor, which was 16 bit, so had just 2 byte words.

Some more pages about the PC here: 1, 2, 3.

📜History

It ran at 8 MHz with 640kB memory, and already featured a 20 MB hard drive (very loud), besides the 360 KB 5¼-inch floppy drive.
I had a monochrome CRT for a while. Then got a color display with 640 x 350 pixels and 16 colors (EGA mode). Sadly the first was junk I couldn’t get rid of, since it had the power supply inside.

I got it when I was 10 years old. After probably a year of using DOS 3.2, Norton Commander and playing very old games (were mostly just bad ports from Amiga as I see now) I wanted to create some of my own.

✍️Motivation

Then luckily after hearing that, my cousin brought me Turbo Pascal 6.0, one book for it, and that’s how it started. I was tinkering with the included BGI demo a lot. It was very big, had 1425 lines of code. Which was so inconvenient to browse, when only 21 lines of code were visible at once (80×25 characters on screen). Still, this and the book examples, were my only sources for most programs at start.

I created few graphical demos and other small programs. And at the age of 12 I have already made a game. It was very simple as I didn’t even know loops, but it worked and had 3 levels. Shortly after I made many more. This is covered in the next post.

📷Pictures

Here is the picture of my first keyboard. It didn’t yet have the extra part with arrows. Which basically duplicates numpad keys (with NumLock off). I got used to it and I prefer that. You have more keys in 1 place, so less moving around, and can have 4 fingers on all arrows. This explains why I tend to remove that part it in my new keyboards.

Next, a picture with my first siskette (a system diskette💾 for short).