computers

G is for… Geek

My dad was a geek.

Explains a lot really. I inherited my love of all things geeky from him. We had a deep fascination with gadgets and gizmos, computers, games, electronic doodads and so on.

We started with an Atari 2600 back in the early 80′s. The original classic wood-veneer version with those wonderfully clunky switches. Our game collection grew rapidly – from Combat to Space Invaders, Asteroids, and so on. We lost *months* of our lives to those games.

Years later he bought a Sega Megadrive, and we whiled away countless more hours on Sonic the Hedgehog and dozens of other cartridges.

We also had a variety of computers in the house, from our first 48k ZX Spectrum, to the SAM Coupe and the Sinclair QL. We would pore over computer magazines, keying in reams and reams of code listings, taking turns to read out the streams of hex numbers whilst the other one keyed them in. We would go into town each saturday, eagerly anticipating the next game we could get – I was always fond of the old text-based adventure games from Level 9, whereas Dad wasn’t quite so fussy.

One day my Dad even brought home a massive computer which his friend the local postmaster was getting rid of. This machine was a *beast*, standing about four feet high with an integral greenscreen monitor. It took *huge* 8-inch floppy disks, and punch cards! We had no idea what it was for, or how it worked, but we loved it, briefly, until we had to get rid of it.

Happy days.

I got my first PC in 1993, just days after my dad passed away. It was an IBM PS/2, 25MHz 486 processor, with 4MB of RAM and 100MB of hard disk space. Cost a fortune. He would have loved it, I’m sure.

I wish he was still here to see the growth of the Internet, the smartphones, the current crop of HD gaming systems, the gadgets and gizmos. He’d be blogging, I’m quite sure, and twittering away.

So, Now it’s my turn to inspire the next generation of geeks in the family.

I can’t wait.