My YouTube Channel is going through a bit of a transition!
With not travelling as much as I used to, I decided to add a new category of content – Tech Content! Beyond travel and music, it’s one more thing I’m quite passionate about.
There is a lot that I want to talk about between retrocomputing history, Internet of Things, and various projects I have going on.
What a steal! CAD$69.99 in 1983 and comes with the arcade game, Frogger and Mixed Game Bag 1!
The problem, and the best way to disappoint a kid – to be clear, the corporation, not my mum who spent hard earned money in 1983 to get me my first computer.
To use those games, you’d need a 16K RAM Pack!
I first explored programming on this computer, with a membrane keyboard and the manual in hand, oh and a Panasonic tape recorder to save my programs to.
I’ve mentioned people in my life who inspired me in my career. I mentioned my great uncle, Reggie.
In my life story of the Timex Sinclair 1000, is another person that inspired me – Kenyon Taylor.
Kenyon and his wife were friends of my grandparents. In my fact, one of his sons and my mother dated for a period of time, I think, in the 1950s. When we would vacation in Northern Ontario, we would often travel to Mindemoya on Manitoulin Island where they lived.
Kenyon is famous as one of the co-inventors of the modern trackball, DATAR, vehicle detection systems, and Flip Disk Displays among a number of other patents. In many respects, I was standing in the presence of engineering greatness not really comprehending it as a kid.
We last saw Kenyon shortly before he passed away in June 1986. I remember Robyn and I being very quiet at his side with mum and some of his family members. He is someone I wish I could have spoken to as a teenager or an adult.
Back to our connection on the Timex Sinclair 1000 – When we visited Kenyon, he had a Timex Sinclair 1000 and he inspired me to learn more programming on it and printed out a number of programs for me to type in.
I still have those programs, printed on the Timex Sinclair 2040, using thermal paper!
It gave me some really good inspiration for algebra and trigonometry in high school.
This is one of a number of moments in my history, definitely a gift that I will always appreciate.
I didn’t always use the Timex Sinclair 1000 after about 1988. I’d occasionally pull it out and plug it in for fun, but I have fully transitioned to using my Commodore 64 for gaming, and homework. None the less, I held on to the computer and, as mentioned, I still have it, as well as two backups – one from an acquaintance from high school, and one my partner Sté is passing on to me.
Sinclair computers were such an important part of making computing available to the masses back in the 80s, especially in Europe and would go on to great acclaim with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, of which I picked up a Spectrum+ when I lived in Norwich in 1995.
I’ve dreamed of having servers in my home to do various things and, I guess, it’s finally taken on a life of it’s own!
See, it started with me implementing Pi-Hole, to stop annoying advertisements from websites. Of course, I have a bunch of IoT devices and have controllers.
Then Raspberry Pi announced the 8Gb Raspberry Pi 4. I bought one as soon as I could and wondered, what should I do with it? I’ve always wanted to install Home Assistant should our network connection ever go down, we can control our devices.
I added a Synology NAS as I needed the space and the redundancy for backups and the Raspberry Pi Retroconsole project I’ve been curating. This also allows me to run Docker containers – the ability to run a particular piece of software in it’s own little – are pretty cool.
The thing with Home Assistant, you don’t want to run that off an SDCard as it will burn it out. So I bought an Argon One M.2 case with a 250 Gb SSD. A Raspberry Pi running off an SDD is pretty quick! It surprised me.
So, Home Assistant doesn’t use that much space, so I’m wasting the space on a 250 Gb SDD! Also, admittedly, the fan on the Argon One M.2 case started making noises and I had situation where I thought I lost the SDD, so I decided to switch the case to a SunFounder Pironman – I’m all about the LED lighting.
So far so good.
So with that done, I’m deciding to experiment with a bunch of services hosted on both the NAS and my Pi 4 8Gb:
Pi-Hole – I’ve already mentioned, this is my Ad Blocker
Home Assistant – i’ve mentioned this too, which allows me to run my IoT devices independent of their cloud brokers
Mealie – This is a new addition, a recipe manager that will scrape website pages for recipes. I really like this concept, and have been somewhat fascinated by recipe managers since my Timex Sinclair 1000 days
WordPress – This was the first iteration of a dashboard, more a page of links to servers and such inside our home. I’m not sure I’ll use this much, but having the option, I might be inspired to put it to use
Homarr – is everything I ever wanted in a Dashboard for a home. It’s easy to add new buttons for internal web services and more! The perfect starting point!
OwnCloud – With the space on the Raspberry Pi, I could put some important files on here as a just in case backup fron the NAS and cloud; accessible anywhere.
Kasm – I heard about this from a YouTube video on servers people are running at home. I’m completely blown away that my Raspberry Pi 4 with 8Gb can run two streaming Docker containers running a game of Doom and a full Debian Linux instance! It’s pretty awesome and gives me a bunchmark for just how powerful a Raspberry Pi is.
Plex – I run Plex off my Mac server for streaming videos
Apple Music – Last but not least, my music streams off my Mac server
I also have dedicated systems that run a web browser, PHP and control LEDs for saying a room is busy.
There you have it – what
Well almost. See, I got the idea to put together my first desktop Windows-based PC in about 20+ years. Why? I guess I was inspired by my Steamdeck which at the time introduced me to the world of modern handheld PC gaming.
I feel in love with the Steamdeck after years of playing on my Sony PS Vita. The fact that games would also play on a PC versus years of consoles and handhelds being separate really got me thinking. I’ve known for a long time that PC gaming is outpacing console gaming.
What did I spec out for the Fishbowl?
I tend to go a bit overboard on my builds because I do want them to last a long time between upgrades. Using an AM5 motherboard also helps keep that future upgrade path as future AMD processors will be supported.
I also admit, blinky lights and customization in the new generation of PC motherboards really grabs my attention. Where before the boring beige aesthetic was, well the boring beige box aesthetic.
The LED pixel and OLED displays and LEDs around the motherboard, the LCD screen on the cooler and the LEDs on the fans really add to the design to make my machine unique. Different colours also add to the ambience too.
I had to set the lighting to two shades of blue and add the two fish to the cooler LCD screen and the OLED display, and voila – digital fish tank!
I admit, I’m seriously impressed by modern PC tech. Now, the amount of power draw from this is quite something.
Comparing what I started out with, to where we are today. The PC I built is 700x more powerful than a Cray XMP super computers in the 80s! I could never have imagined that as a kid. Even something as small as a Raspberry Pi, what that can do, relative to, even 30 years ago.
I’ve not had a desktop PC since the early 2000s, when I switched to a Mac. I wasn’t a huge PC gamer, and I had started console gaming. Prior to that, I was gaming on 16-bit hardware like an Amiga 500.
I’ve known that PCs were very much getting ahead of consoles, which, at one point, used to be leading edge. Really researching what to put in my build, and seeing the results of it playing Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 – Just incredible.
I’ve enjoyed the gaming experience so much on my Steamdeck, being able to play those games, literally anywhere between the Steamdeck, on my PC, or on my PC laptop, or streaming in my living room – is epic.
This month I celebrate 40 years since I was given my first computer – A Timex Sinclair 1000. I’ve talked about and reminisced about this time period often.
Mum finally agreed to get a computer, so off we went to Consumers Distributing in Mississauga on Dundas St, after piano lessons. It was between a Timex Sinclair 1000 or a Texas Instruments TI99/4a – both being on sale. As history would have it, we bough the Timex Sinclair 1000 for CA$69.99 in 1983 – Today apparently that’s $211.77 adjusted for inflation!
That was a huge purchase back in the day, and it had a massive impact on my life.
Two months later, my Dad bought us a Commodore 64 for Christmas at a Zellers in Guelph complete with a Vic Desk, Monitor and disk drive! It was an amazing setup!
With my parents divorced, we had to keep the Sinclair a secret from Dad out of the irrational fear that he would not buy us the Commodore.
I’m so glad and very fortunate my parents invested in my future though both systems. It’s let me appreciate generations of computers from an early age. I used both a fair but, and we expanded the Sinclair with the thermal printer and a 16k RAM pack so we could play Frogger in black and white. 10 minutes to load from a tape deck!
In 1987, an acquaintance from school gave me his TS/1000 and a bunch of tapes. Both still are here with me, as are the tapes and a tape deck.
The impact of having a computer in my life did several things
My history of computing goes something like this
If I were to include game machines:
Which gives me pause for thought.
Put my Timex Sinclair 1000 next to my new desktop PC – As a kid, I could not fathom having a computer that could generate the images that we now see in 4K on our computer monitors. My friends and I thought it was going to be an impossible task to emulate an Amiga, yet, today we have small credit-card sized computers that can emulate such a machine many times faster, with a huge amount of ram and storage space, relatively speaking.
At that time in the 80s, I’m not sure we could envision what we have today, even in the 90s. I think, by the 2000s you could see where things were going so the surprises are becoming fewer and fewer.
How many Cray XMPs are on my desktop? 800 MFLOPs versus 563 GFLOP (563000 MFLOPS) – 703 times the processing power!
We’ve come a long way from having to cool super computers the way we did in the 80s to what we have today.
The power of my new desktop, even my laptop, is completely insane!
I do believe one of my Timex Sinclair 1000s still works, the other would need to reconnect the keyboard properly and fix one of the membrane keys. The other challenge is having a TV with an analogue antenna port, which I do have, so I have ways of connecting the computer up to a TV.
This is one of the reasons I believe in retro gaming archives and emulation, so people can experience what it was like using some of these more “primitive” machines which are so important to computing history, inspiring people and getting computers into the home.
I won’t lie that I miss the discussions we would have on the merits of different platforms, specifications, what computer the future should pick but that business had blinders on focusing on Intel 80X86 systems rather than the superior Motorola 680X0 series, what the future should be. We were all idealists back then, and we did have some foresight.
Thing is, that discussion became – Xbox versus Playstation, AMD versus Intel, Windows versus macOS. Where it used to be considerably broader, it always seemed to become two against each other – Commodore versus Atari back in the day.
DOS and Windows did become way more refined like Amiga Workbench and Apple macOS. Platforms are a lot more open. For example could you imagine the Windows Subsystem for Linux to run Linux oriented software on Windows? macOS being built on BSD? I couldn’t have either.
So what is there to get excited about these days, especially given 40 years of system versus system battles? Here is what I’m interested in:
There are other things too, but those are the top three.
It’s been an incredible journey of 40 years.