40 years — a personal storyline of hardware (and software) from the heart of Europe to Silicon Valley

I was born just a day after Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer. The date back then was April 1, 1976.

40 years later — 3 weeks ago — I visited the house at 2066 Crist Dr. in Los Altos, California, “…the place where Jobs and Wozniak, along with others, churned out the very first Apple computers”.

It took me a while to get there. It wasn’t just a question of time, but also the distance…

That garage in Los Altos is 6108 miles (9830 kms) away from my birthplace. A city at the heart of Europe where no smaller legends were born but Andrew Stephen “Andy” Grove (born András István Gróf) and John von Neumann (born Neumann János), Budapest, Hungary.

If you’ve got a few more minutes let me dive into this unique journey of information technology through the eyes of a young Hungarian who was fortunate enough to experience the most significant milestones of information technology that took place in the past 40 years.

Let’s go.

Commodore 16 & BASIC

My very first computer was a Commodore 16. Smuggled* into Hungary from Austria at a time when Hungary was still behind the Iron Curtain this computer was still on the COCOM list.

A so called “home computer” — released in 1984, including a cassette tape drive, 16KB of RAM and a CPU running at a speed of 0.89 MHz.

Besides playing games I started learning BASIC (Commodore BASIC 3.5) and managed to get to a level where I was able to move graphical objects around on the screen. I was 9 years old at that time.

386SX, floppies & Turbo Pascal

Fast forward a few more years, I managed to enter the era of the “IBM PC” — that’s how it was called back then.

These pieces of hardware were super-expensive over here but somehow luck was on my side as I managed to get a 386SX PC from the local small town TV studio. It did not have a hard drive, I could only use the built in 5.25” floppy drive (with 1.2MB of space on each floppy disk). It had 2MB of RAM and a CPU running at 16MHz.

I booted from an MS-DOS floppy then swapped it to the one which contained a copy of Turbo Pascal.

386DX, the first Hard Drive & Object Oriented Programming

2 years later in 1990 — at the age of 14 — I managed to replace this PC with a slightly better one with 8MB of RAM and a true 386 CPU: the 386DX running at a speed of 40MHz.

This time I’ve got my very first hard drive with 40MB of space and installed Windows 3.1 on it. Man, was that fast and convenient and cool? Hell, yeah!

It took me an entire summer holiday to get my head around object oriented programming — since this was the big promise of the most recent version of Turbo Pascal at that time.

I managed to write not only simple, well structured algorithms but also started working with the basic (non-graphical) windowing system, Turbo Vision. It seemed a huge step in programming to me.

First laptop: Compaq Presario 1235 with HDD and CD-ROM drive; VRML

Fast forward another 7 years, in 1997 I managed to get my very first laptop. It had an AMD K6 MMX processor running at 266MHz, 32MB RAM, a 4.3GB HDD and a CD-ROM drive.

This was the time when I thought I reached my dream setup, a PC that I can carry everywhere. It run Windows 98.

I started studying web related scripting languages including VRML. Managed to build a VRML model of our flat in 3D and was able to render and “fly through” it in a web browser. It was awesome!

Laptops, laptops: Sony VAIO, Windows XP and Linux

From this point I settled on Sony VAIO-s. My next laptop was the PCG-FXA32 with a 900MHz AMD Duron CPU, 128MB RAM (wohooo!), 15GB HDD and a DVD-ROM drive. It came with Windows XP Home Edition pre-installed.

That was the time when I stated looking at other alternative operating systems — installed Red Hat Linux and then moved to the Fedora Linux family.

A whole new world opened: shell scripting, bash, perl, the kernel and window managers, daemons, cron… Wow!

The Sony VAIO VGN-T2XP/S

One of my very best — and most expensive — purchase was the T2XP, one of the first high end ultra portable laptops from Sony. It was VERY, VERY expensive — I basically paid the price of a decent used car in Hungary at that time.

Since it was super light I carried it everywhere. It had a mobile ultra low voltage Intel CPU, the Intel Pentium M 753 running at 1.2GHz, included 512MB RAM, 60GB HDD and a DVD-RW drive. With the battery lasting over 7 hours (!!!) it was simply indestructible.

I still own this beauty — currently running BunsenLabs Linux (CrunchBang Linux) on it.

The era of aluminium

It was around 2008–2009 when I realised — and technology advanced that far — that virtualisation allows me to run Linux and basically any operating system and any programming environment on a strong foundation of decent hardware. Apple stuff.

(At work I worked on Dell and HP laptops — those were very decent too. ;))

The first unibody MacBook (late 2008) contained an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU running at 2GHz, had (only) 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD and the superdrive. It was preinstalled with Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5).

Unfortunately, this particular MacBook suddenly died a year later: the logic board had some issues that was not repairable.

The bad news was that the main part, the logic board had to be replaced. Estimated cost: around £800. WTF?! After a few minutes of consideration I simply asked the guy at the Apple store: how much does the latest MacBook Air cost? It was around £900 at that time. So I got one of those. Good move.

It was the late 2010 11-inch model, one of the most reliable ones in the series. My wife still owns it and loves it. It’s another piece of indestructible beauty.

I particularly liked Steve Job’s presentation when he showed the world a MacBook Air for the first time from the inside. When I saw how beautiful it was in the inside I knew it’s going to last long.

Today: still living in the world of aluminium

My latest laptop is the late 2013 13-inch retina MacBook Pro. With a decent SSD, Core i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM I hope it will last a good few more years.

With virtualisation I run a copy of Windows 10, Ubuntu and of course a bunch of Docker images on it. Experience: flawless.

It was quite a journey from 16KB of RAM and a cassette tape to GBs of RAM, GHz speed CPUs and TB scale SSDs, all portable. Took little less than 40 years.

What’s your story?

*This story is probably worth an entirely separate post ;)