I dearly miss my adoptive father, and his close friend, who introduced me to computers in the early 1980s, in a dreary backwater town of a backwater Middle-Eastern country, starting with a Sinclair ZX-81, soon followed by a ZX Spectrum :)
We were always behind the rest of the world in everything; to get new software or books and magazines we had to wait for someone to make a 10-12 hour trip to the nearest major city, which happened once every couple months, so we had to prepare wishlists in advance ^^
Those 80s computer mags were the best part of my childhood: Your Sinclair and specially ZZAP! because those were all I had access to when someone else was using the TV, or the computer, or just waiting for the electricity to come back on (something which that part of the world still struggles with)
I graduated to a Commodore 64 and fantasized about getting a Commodore Amiga, but by the time we could afford a new computer, the world had moved on, and I got my first "IBM PC" in 1993: a 286 with a 40 MB (megabyte) HD :)
My dad's friend, my uncle, was pretty much a genius who had taught himself electronics, repaired his own TVs etc and even built his own audio equipment and other simple devices for his friends. He tried to teach me programming in BASIC but none of it stuck with me (I try to make up for that by learning Z80 and 6502 coding these days)
The guy died relatively young, and his genius was never recognized outside our small town, but the children he influenced and instilled a love of technology in, always remember him and owe their skills to him.
We were always behind the rest of the world in everything; to get new software or books and magazines we had to wait for someone to make a 10-12 hour trip to the nearest major city, which happened once every couple months, so we had to prepare wishlists in advance ^^
Those 80s computer mags were the best part of my childhood: Your Sinclair and specially ZZAP! because those were all I had access to when someone else was using the TV, or the computer, or just waiting for the electricity to come back on (something which that part of the world still struggles with)
I graduated to a Commodore 64 and fantasized about getting a Commodore Amiga, but by the time we could afford a new computer, the world had moved on, and I got my first "IBM PC" in 1993: a 286 with a 40 MB (megabyte) HD :)
My dad's friend, my uncle, was pretty much a genius who had taught himself electronics, repaired his own TVs etc and even built his own audio equipment and other simple devices for his friends. He tried to teach me programming in BASIC but none of it stuck with me (I try to make up for that by learning Z80 and 6502 coding these days)
The guy died relatively young, and his genius was never recognized outside our small town, but the children he influenced and instilled a love of technology in, always remember him and owe their skills to him.