1983 - The Sinclair ZX Spectrum period.

At the age of 17 years old I bought a Sinclair Spectrum 48K. It was the first home computer on the market (together with the Commodore 64).  I bought it for myself after saving for it by working side jobs (window cleaning, car washing, carrying banana crates, cleaning jobs, paper routes, to name a few) while going to college studying Mechanical Engineering.

For those readers who like specs:

• Speed: 3.5 MHz; Ram: 48k;
• Size: 233x144x30 mm (WxHxD);
• Connected to a regular television;
• Image resolution: 256×192.
  

To load programs a cassette player was attached to it and it would sometimes take 5 or 10 minutes to load. It took about 10 minutes to save a file or data as well!

Some great software was available for this machine and I really liked the word processor. To speed up the loading process, I purchased a Microdrive. This was a small cassette with an endless tape; it was about 10 times faster than a regular cassette tape was.

Some friends had the same machine and we went to so called "Spectrum Meetings" to exchange knowledge and of course software.

I purchased one of the first "NLQ" dot matrix printers, a Smith Corona. NLQ stands for Near Letter Quality. This machine was about ten times larger than my computer was! The printing quality was very high for the time. It went over each line four times before proceeding. Imagine the time it too to print anything.

1987 - The Atari 1040ST period.

It was time for an upgrade. Some of my friends upgraded to the new Sinclair QL with built in Microdrives. I opted for the Atari 1040ST instead. This was a Macintosh (Mac) clone; with the same processor as a Mac but only half the price. It was operated by a mouse. It also came with a beautiful gray scale monitor (IBM and its clones still had the two tone screens which usually had a black screen with green letters). My monitor had 640x400 pixels. Coming from the Sinclair, I suddenly went from 48K to 1000K (1Mb) ram, which was an enormous increase! It was one of the first computers that used the new, double sided 3-1/2" (hard) floppy disks (instead of the 5-1/4" flexible ones). It took only a minute or so to load the programs.

A short while later I needed more storage space. Atari came out with a new external hard disk. I bought it the day it came out! It had 60Mb of storage space and was very noisy. The software was fantastic. Desktop publishing programs where my favourite ones. Playing with graphic design software (yes, I started that early!), meant that I put my printer, which I still had, to good use. The one big problem with this printer: printing one page of simple text took about half an hour and since computers in that time could just do one thing at the time, it left my computer too busy to do anything else while it was printing. 

This type of computer was much used by musicians because it was the first one that had built-in midi plug-ins. I had installed a musical score program. This was used extensively by my then girlfriend (now my wife, Josephine van Lier) who was graduating at the university in music performance and pedagogy. She had to make arrangements of many pieces of music and for her composition classes also compose music. She did that on my machine.

Of course I still went to weekly meetings at the computer club, where I could get a hold of a Mac Emulator. This lead to some disasters. I accidentally formated the wrong hard drive partition just moments before Josephine was to print her composition and arrangement exam work for the next day. Needless to say that it caused some very tense hours. Luckily it did not lead to a break-up!

Josephine also was the first student in the music department who submitted her thesis (including scores) entirely made on a computer. Until that time the music students still wrote their thesis on a type writer, or even by hand! Her thesis served as an example for many years.

For my work experience program at the university I worked for a company formerly known as Brons Motoren Fabriek, later purchased by Waukesha, a engine manufacturer for large ships. I had to program their CNC equipment and develloped some software for them. Later I was asked a few times back, I had to recover critcal data from their computers.

My own graduating project and thesis at the University, was titled "Innovating at Score". Score was a company specialized in office desks and chairs. These were the early days of computers and my partner and I decided there should be such a thing as a special desk for computers, which would have to be height adjustable, house the screen, keyboard and mouse, could be closed when not in use, etc. We had to develop the entire thing, all the way from market research and feasibility, to the design and even the actual building of the "desk"

1998 - The Windows 98/Me/Pentium period.

At home I postponed buying a computer until high speed internet connections came available in our neighbourhood.

I purchased a very standard, Windows based desktop computer. No specification to write home about, although I did buy a beautiful 17" Sony screen. Later I upgraded this computer to Windows ME.

It was with this computer that I first ventured into the making of websites. I installed Dreamweaver and started building my own website. Other sites followed. I quickly discovered that the graphic capabilities of this machine were insufficient. I needed to upgrade to something better.

2002 - The Toshiba Satelite 5200 period.

I figured that I needed something portable, but capable of doing graphics. The Toshiba Satelite 5200 was the only laptop option at the time. Of course I looked into possibly purchasing a Mac, like many designers, but the screen of the Toshiba was so much better! It had a resolution of 1600x1200 pixels and a hard drive of 40GB and a build-in boom box. 1 GB RAM, Pentium 4; it was a fantastic unit (although the batteries drained within an hour!). The operating system was Windows XP. Of course I installed Photoshop, Illustrator and other programs belonging to that "family" and started "plugging away".

In 2004 I decided to sell my shares in the Metal Fabrication company. From now on I would focus on my art and web designing!

I was very happy with this machine. Many of my websites were built on it.

After a few years it started become slow and grumpy. Grumpy computer meant grumpy me!
The hard drive finally gave up (Yes: I did back up all of my information) and it left a permanent burn mark on a beautiful wooden desk of one my friends in Jasper. It over heated and basically blew itself up.

2007 - The Dell Inspiron 9400 period.

Now that my treasured Toshiba gave the ghost I needed to purchase yet another computer...
And yet again I looked into buying a Mac. There is so much talk about graphic designers using a Mac. But extensive research showed me that Apple would not be able to give me my "dream machine".

The number one feature for me had to be a super high resolution screen. For me the ability to put as much information as possible on a screen is important. That means a very high resolutions. For most people that means the letters on the screen would be much too small for their liking, but for me it means that I can have a wealth of information on the screen. Ideal for web designing. Only Toshiba and the Dell had a screen in their line-up that could potentially satisfy me. What I was looking for was a wide screen, 1950x1200 pixels. Such a beautiful screen!

I opted for the Dell 9400 with 2GB Ram and a very fast hard drive. It is an 2.16GHz T7400 Intel Core 2 Duo processor. I did upgrade the graphics card. I am using Windows Vista on it. The battery life is excellent! Many website have been built on it already.

I use several portable external hard drives, ranging from 40GB-250GB. And I use a 1TB server to store information. Of course backups are of utmost importance.

My favourite software is the new Adobe Design Premium CS3 package (Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc).

The HP 2605 desk jet network printer I am using is a great unit. I can now print wireless and it will print double sided, which safes the environment (of course I do try to limit the amount op printing as much as possible).