Where it all started

Hi everybody! 
My name is Daniele, but my friends call me Alf (yes, like the alien ant eater, but there's no connection with it)
I'm a 24 years-old guy from Turin, Italy.


As you may guess from the name of my blog, this place will be mainly devoted to one of my favourite hobbies: computer games. And since I'm a quite nostalgic guy, I'd like to talk about computer games belonging to my childhood and teenage. Basically, computer games from the past, so what is usually called "Retrogaming"


Since I don't have so many friends interested in this topic, I hope that I'll have the possibility to know other people that share the same passion through this blog.


As this is the first post, I really have to start...from the beginning. 


I've been playing computer games since a was a small kid. I don't remember exactly, but I think I was five or maximum six years old. All I remember is that one evening my dad came home with a couple of big boxes. "What's inside?" - I asked. "Our first personal computer" - he said. Actually, I didn't know exactly what that meant, but I would have discovered it soon.
It was a AMSTRAD 5286, equipped (if I remember well), with a 1 Mb hard drive and few Kb of ram.
My dad bought it for typing and accounting, and basically because a PC was "the new thing" at that time, and he was curious to try. From time to time he used to show me some computer games he got together with the pc, but I was just watching him playing (or better, trying to play).


One (maybe two?) years later, he got a newer PC - a 486 - and something happened.
It was mid October, just some weeks before my birthday. I had been asking for a R/C car as birthday present for a very long time. I really wanted a R/C car, but not a toy one: I craved for one with spark-ignition engine.
My parents were not 100% convinced, as - they said - apart from being a very expensive present, I had not so many opportunities to exploit it, since I had no place to play with it.
Moreover, since my dad knew I was also interested in his computer, he made me this proposal: instead of the R/C car they would have bought me a new display so that I could use his old PC.
I had no secondo thoughts: that year I got the display as birthday present, and with that my first personal computer EVER!


And this is how it all started.


Since then, I changed PC several times, passing from 1st generation of Pentium processors, to the i7 quad core that equips my present laptop. But my first PC - the AMSTRAD 286, will always be unforgettable for me. Actually, it came along with me in all these years, since I used it as support for the display.


Unfortunately, some months ago I moved to another place, and due to space limitations I had to get rid of it. 
I wish I wouldn't have done it. It's really such a a pity.

That's how it looked like. I like to wonder that someone picked it up from the dump and right now it's playing with it.




Image: mypccollection.altervista.org