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Bonjour from Québec

S

SParent

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 7, 2013
Messages
74
Location
Quebec City
Hi all,

My name is Sylvain and I'm in the upper half of the 40s, so I grew up with the computer revolution. I got hooked to electronics and building mechanical stuff before turning 10, and I never quit. I studied electronics (analog and digital), programming, and physics.

I got and used a lot of computers in my life, and I moved a lot too, so I didn't keep much stuff. However, I recently got into the habit of scouring the local flea market, the classifieds and eBay, looking for computers I owned previously. Of course I found a lot, and I told my wife that I could resell them at a profit. Strangely, I found it difficult to part with my new toys, so I didn't sell a single one yet, and I here...

Currently I own : Vic 20, C64, 1541x3, a Coco 2, an Amiga 3000, an Apple IIc, Pentium II 350MHz, and two Power mac G3. My favorite is the Amiga!

Nice to meet you all!
 
Welcome to the forums :) Somehow I ended up in full reply mode instead of quick reply mode so I don't have my cheat sheet of what systems you have open heh. Were those all systems you previously had the opportunity to play with or are some of them new to you? One of my reasons behind being such a fan of Amiga was seeing what it could do compared to the PCs I had around at the same time. I think that's unfortunately hard to relate to folks if they couldn't see the competition when it was new, although I'm guilty of that too to an extent for older systems which I've only been given the chance to catch up with now that they're cheap. It was amazing to see the full color spectrum they could provide, games with such amazing synthesized music. Only when we got our first 486 and spent some additional cash on an adlib card did it start to compete and become similar in ability.
 
Hi, Sylvain!

Welcome to the black hole - the hobby that sucks you in and never lets you go! (well at least until the wives get fed up and threaten to throw us out if we don't throw our "junk" out!)

I started back in like you, picking up one or two systems that I had used in the past... and that was about 20 computers ago ;) Good luck on keeping that count down!

Outside of the 80486 era in the PC world, I'm a Commodore fan, 8-bit preferably, but I've several Amigas as well ranging the full spectrum from the 500 to the 4000T. The C= line always amazed me as when I saw a C64 play Impossible Mission, I was blown away - graphically and playability, it was nearly on par with what my new, stock 486SX-25 could do at the time, and certainly more than any of the competing PC's of its era could do! A few years later, I saw an Amiga 1200 for the first time and was similarly blown away, as it was basically doing (in certain video modes) everything that my brand-spanking-new Pentium-90 based system could do, and then some!

Always fun....
 
barythrin:
I actually had the occasion to play with all of them, plus a few others (TI 99 4/A, coco 1, amiga 1000, 500, 2000, sharp PC 1211...). I even had the chance to punch cards and wait a full day to get the results of my program, handled as a printout by the mainframe's operator! My first year in college was the last one of this venerable dinosaur.

What I found the most brilliant about the Amiga was its operating system, from a programmer's point of view. On the Amiga I learned to consider computer resources as processes, which you could ask things and wait for them to complete, in a multitasking environment. It was a real revolution compared to the other consumer machines on the market.

Maverick1978:
Two Powermac G4 coming in this weekend... I'll do my best to stay under 20!!!
 
Bonjour Sylvain,

I'm in the upper half of the 40s too.

I'm an electronics designer and software writer.

How are the local flea market prices? I tend to buy from eBay
 
They're usually quite low, but the quality varies greatly. For example, my two last finds: a Vic-20 with PS for 10$, works great, but the case of the Vic is quite yellowed. A Coco 2 for 20$ which I had to repair (easy, two components to resolder) and works great now, but power switch broken. Since then I upgraded it to 64k and added a Extended basic Rom chip. Of course, compared to eBay, the big saver here is S&H.
 
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