A personal collection of technology that shaped my world
When I was a kid in the 80s, I was totally blown away by the first computer I ever saw — a Commodore 64. It was like magic. I was playing Pitstop II one day and I thought: how can this tiny box do all these amazing things? That's when I discovered the world of programming, algorithms, and even controlling light speed. From that moment on, I've been hooked.
I've witnessed the incredible evolution of computing power first-hand — from the early 8-bit CPUs like the MOS 6502, with its 3,500 transistors, to the 32-bit era with over a million, in the same physical space, like the Intel 486DX2. The way technology scaled up so dramatically in such a short time is still mind-boggling to me.
I remember loading programs from cassette tapes with a Commodore Datassette — waiting minutes for games smaller than 50 KB. Then floppy disks arrived, and storage exploded. Netscape was distributed on six 3.5" disks. Software came in big boxes with CDs inside. And then the first pen drive: 256 MB in a flash storage device the size of a pack of chewing gum. Each transition felt like a small miracle.
In the 80s, computers were simple enough to open up and understand. In the 90s, I built my own beige PC — the height of the Wintel era. Then, in the early 2000s, the Mac arrived. Beautiful design, but increasingly harder to fix or upgrade. A trade-off that still sparks debate today.
At the beginning, computers were islands, stuck on desks in my room. In the 90s the Internet arrived and started connecting everything. It was slow — a 56K modem — but the excitement was real. Then ADSL, then Wi-Fi, then cellular networks. I remember seeing software that could travel as a stream of bits, needing no physical medium. We could share these bits wirelessly. It felt like magic, again.
I witnessed the birth of the post-PC era with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. I've written code for almost all of these devices — from BASIC and assembly to Java, C++, Objective-C, and Python. And I've watched, with the same amazement I had as a kid in front of that C64, how this technology has changed everything: how we communicate, how we work, how we live.