This was purchased in 1988, as a result of six weeks work in a bookbinders during my summer holidays from school. It was originally going to cost 159 pounds sterling, but I was "persuaded" to spend an extra ten pounds in order to get a copy of ST BASIC, a mouse mat, and one or two other utilities. Only the mouse mat was still being used after the first week (and is, in fact, still in use as I type this).

My original reasons for buying an ST were that it was cheap, friendly and easy to use, and quite powerful at the time. I had used a friends ST for a bit before making my decision, and I was hooked. It also followed a family tradition in my house which had seen the purchase (and usage to the point of destruction) of several Atari 2600 games consoles, and of a secondhand Atari 800XL that I bought. Please don't get the impression that we were blinkered, though, since I cut my computing teeth on a Sinclair ZX81 (and still own two!) followed by a Commodore Vic 20. I also had extensive usage of a C64, Dragon 32 and Amiga, before making my decision. My family has since moved on to a Nintendo, though my recent(ish) acquisition of an Atari Jaguar has seen the former relegated into second place.

For about 2 years I used the STFM on a black and white television. I had a bizarre patching arrangement whereby I could see things in colour - but only by going into my parents bedroom (from where I couldn't actually reach the computer) - so this honour was reserved for the few occasions when I would dabble with art programs. Eventually I bought a secondhand colour television, which is still working perfectly today.

Aside from the television, the first major upgrade I made to the computer was some additional memory. The way that I got this memory is very long winded, so I'll leave it out for now. I purchased an Evesham Micros SIMMs motherboard, and soon had 1Mb of memory in my lowly STFM. Soon, however, this proved too small, so I ordered some more SIMMs (I can't remember where from), and brought the memory up to a full complement of 4Mb. Around this time I also bought a second floppy disk drive.

The next upgrade reflected my increasing interest in the serious side of computing - especially C programming. I bought an Atari SM144 monochrome monitor - giving me a high resolution, rock steady and very easy to work with display.

After the purchase of my Falcon, the ST sat in neglect for a while. When I chose to leave work to go to university, however, I opted to take my faithful old ST, rather than the more thievingly tempting Falcon. Of course, it would require a little upgrading.

The results of this "little upgrading" are that I now have a 28MHz ST (originally 8MHz) care of a T28 accelerator from System Solutions, with an increased resolution (Autoswitch Overscan, also from SS), 38400 baud serial port (mod found on the net), 3 MIDI INs and 6 OUTs, with SMPTE synch (Emagic LOG3 & UNITOR II), synchable to an audio trigger (C-LAB Human Touch), with a TOS 2.06 upgrade, all packaged in a 19" rack unit (a result of my own engineering skills - and it shows!).

In 1992 Michelle Laybourn (one of the honorary members of my band) wanted to buy a new computer to replace her very ageing PC (nicknamed Babbage's Engine). She wanted to be able to do word processing and all the other usual stuff, but in particular wanted something that would be good for music. Leaning heavily on this latter point I persuaded her to buy one of the first Falcons to enter the country. After initially impressing her with the bundled programs, she soon decided that she wanted to see more. The next time I went round to her house, I took a bundle of disks from the ST.

Unfortunately most of these programs were, well ... crap really. Having enthused to her about the wonderful graphics capabilities of this machine, the only art package that I could get to run was Degas Elite - fine in its time, but now looking a little dated. "So how many colours can this use then," she asked. "Erm .... sixteen," I whimpered in reply. "That's hardly any better than Babbage's Engine".

The next few months were strained, to say the least. In fact it was twice as many colours as Babbage's Engine - and at least you could choose which sixteen (The engine had a choice of eight colours, from a palette of eight!). Nevertheless this was a far throw from the thousands of colours that I had promised her. It also didn't help that I had no access to the net, so I couldn't even grab demos from there. Things got sorted in February '93 however, when we went to a computer show at Wembley. There, on display, were dozens of Falcons, showing the latest software and hardware, and there were even some bits for sale.

I bought the abysmal TruePaint - a useless art package, but at least we could view all those lovely high colour pictures I'd been collecting. Michelle bought Musicom - an elementary sampler and effects program. At last she was impressed. Over the following months more and more software was added to the collection, and I was getting increasingly tempted to buy a Falcon of my own.

In the middle of 1993 I finally finished the repayments on a bank loan I had taken out - so I immediately took out another! This got spent on a Falcon030 for myself, as well as a Fostex DCM100 MIDI controlled mixer. After going through one suicidal monitor, I ended up with a very stable and nice system to work with. Of course, I'd have to upgrade something...

My first upgrade was to buy BlowUp - a resolution enhancer. This never seemed entirely happy, and got worse when I added a 128Mb magneto-optical drive to the system. Essentially, with the BlowUp software installed, the machine would crash if I tried to manipulate more than about 100 files! This was largely due to how I had it set up, however I then switched to Screenblaster - a similar device to BlowUp - and have had no problems since.

More recently I have bought a secondhand PC emulator (286), for those masochistic DOS/Win3.1 moments! At the same time I also got another STFM, which was lucky because....

...in September 1995 my trusty old ST gave up on life. I tried to salvage it several times, but it started out by being claustrophobic (wouldn't work with the lid on), then became agrophobic (wouldn't work with the lid off), and finally became just phobic (wouldn't work). I now plan to move my accelerator etc. to the "new" ST, but in the meantime have had to borrow another ST off someone, in order to work on these pages. I will probably buy a Mega STe off a friend of mine who wants to sell his, in order to compensate me for the trauma I have suffered.

Well, the "new" STFM is in the middle of being racked - I am working on it as a long term project. The "old" STFM is still dead, though I intend to try to revive it when I get the time and inclination. I almost bought the mega STe, but it has been having serious hard drive problems. When I go home for Easter, I am going to try a friend's hard drive interface in it - if that works then I'll still buy the machine, and get a new hard drive card for it. If not, then I'll save the money instead.

I have, however, bought a "normal" STe off a friend, which has been used to write these pages since Christmas. I moved the 4 megs of memory from the old STFM into it in order for MiNT and MultiTOS to run as usual. It has a dead serial port, but I'm going to attempt to fix that, since I have now been given FIVE dumb terminals! And I already had one!! Do I sense a Unix network coming on....?

Last year I also bought a Jaguar games console, which was supplemented earlier this year with a Jaguar CD add on. These are covered more here.

A looong overdue update this time round! So what's new? No new Atari computers, though I have bought an Apple clone, and have been playing around with the handful of Atari emulators for this and the PC. I have to say that I've been quite impressed, and even wrote one review for Atari Computing using them.

Things are not so great on the hardware front. I decided some time ago to move my Falcon into a PC tower case, but in doing so accidentally mis-wired the video connection. It took a few months to track down the relevant circuit diagram in order to fix this problem, but eventually it happened. Whilst re-housing the motherboard, I also decided to fit a Nemesis bus accelerator, from Titan Designs. This should have the effect of not only speeding up the CPU, FPU and DSP, but also of allowing greater colour depths and resolutions.

Naturally, however, things have not gone according to plan. It all seemed to be going well, as I installed the buffer modification and the first parts of the Nemesis with textbook results, but when I added the switching lines (i.e. the bit that allows you to actually turn the Nemesis on and off), the Falcon refused to boot. Removing one of the switching lines cures the problem, so it's probably not a major issue. I'll be doing some more investigation into this over the weekend, so if you're interested (yeah, right), look back in a week or two.