Grew up with the Apple II, C64, CP/M generation (showing age) of computers and learned coding in Basic and 6502 assembly.
Did many hobby coding projects on those platforms at the time, but also semi professional work with Superbase64. Moving with the tide from C64 to Amiga computers and later into Intel/AMD processor PCs as most of us at the time. Still working in ICT, however no longer doing development work. At times I'm looking with some envy to those coding with PHP, C++ using Mulesoft integration and other enterprise platforms like Jira and Confluence. I'm mostly supporting them as a project manager these days to pay the bills.
Having said that I still like it to spend some hours every now and then mainly over winter to fire up my old C64, C-one(!) and Amiga 2000 to run some old project, old demos, browse the web or play a game. Also following projects like the c64preservation project and browsing around on lemon64 to see what the latest activities are in the C64 scene. To continue doing so I had to look into preservation myself, e.g. had to replace the leaking Amiga2000 clock battery with my very basic soldering skills and got myself some cables and software to move software from the old floppy discs to harddisks and later SD cards with 1541 Ultimate II.
When I write this I'm running into some issues with reading floppy discs on the old 1541 disk-drive, spend a lot time on watching videos and applying them to align, clean and inspect the drive inside out.
Unfortunately I can't seem to fix it lacking the experience, spares and equipment to pinpoint to the failing components and replace those. That's where I hope to get to learn some others in the local scene who may be able to help out with tips or spares or provide repair services in Northland or Auckland region. Will make a separate post about my particular issue at hand with the 1541 drive.
Finally an overview of the hardware I still own myself in a more or less working state and can talk about
- C64, 1541 and 1541-II drive, datasette, Ultimate II, 1084 monitor, VGA/LED monitor converter, 1541 diag cartridge, 2 Suzo joysticks, Power cartridge, 80-colums cartridge, Seikosha GP100-VC printer
and a bunch of software on approx. 120 5 1/4 floppies.
- C-One FPGA motherboard http://c64upgra.de/c-one/ with c64 core(s)
- Amiga 2000 with Golden Gate 486SLC card http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/goldengate, GVP68040 + 8Gb 110/24 EGS video card http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/egs110,
A2065 ethernet (coax), A2320, Medusa v1 rom, GVP Scsi card and SCSI harddisks, Toshiba SCSI SCSI external CD player, Amiga SD floppy emulator, Laserjet 4m and many 3 1/2 inch floppies and CDroms.
- Compaq Armada 4120 laptop + dock (1997), served its later years as Linux router/firewall with 2 PCMCIA 10Mb network cards in my home network up to 2007.