Computer history(Or how I waste my money on computer hardware):

My first computer contact was at a neigbour's who owned a Tandy around 1981.

Later I played games with ZX81 and Spectrum at friends so I decided to save up and buy a Commodore 64
when I was in 3rd grade secondary school 1982 I dabbled with Basic, peeks and pokes (remember 53248 VIC base address?) and a little 6510 programming. Because I had lots of problems with the C64 (it kept breaking down if you switched it off for more than a week) I decided to upgrade to a Commodore 128 keyboard_attached model. This upgrade did not bring much.

While attending the HTS (1986-1990) there was a need to get acquainted with PC compatibles so my dad made me upgrade to a PC (thanks dad!) a LASER XT/3 with a 8086 running at 10Mhz with a 30MB Seagate RLL harddisk, 640K RAM (later with extra 1 MB EMS4.0 RAM to create a RAM disk). At that time I was programming in Turbo Pascal 5.0 and dBaseIII & IV.

When I started work at Ericsson in 1993 I made good on a promise I had made to myself to buy a decent PC from my first earned real cash. Enter the 486DX2/66 in august 1993 (approx. US$3000).

I focussed on work related programming skills after this point. PLEX (Programming Language for EXchanges) a procedural language for realtime applications, ASA : Ericsson assembly language for CP, EMRP assembly and RP assembly. I don't use the PC for much more then games, and as a tool for work. At work I have had access to the internet since late 1994.

Summer of 1997 I upgraded the 486 by buying an AMD K6/200, ASUS T2P4 motherboard,a new graphics card (Diamond Stealth3D pro) and 32 megs of memory. At the HCC computer expo two months later I could not control myself and bought a Seagate 3.2 G HD and a 56Kflex modem to replace my 14k4 which I only used for telebanking.
Thanks to the 56K I joined NLNET, but because they are quite expensive I moved over to Cistron who are also offering 56K nationwide. NLNET provided faster international connections though, and I never got a busy line with them.

June : I decided to get a 3DFX card, a Monster 3D II, which leaves me playing games all night!
I have bought extra memory (32MB -> 96MB) to stop quakeII from swapping memory all the time and for my birthday last august (1998) my girlfriend gave me a K6-2 300. This is absolutely the best, (I'm typing this at 300@75 after just having played QuakeII at 65fps at 800*600, 74fps at 640*480).
November : This year I went to the HCC computer expo again and got a bigger HD (10G IBM), a Viper330PCI, the Labtec speakers and last but not least a great 19inch monitor  Iiyama S901GT .
Latest addition (29/12/1998) : AOPEN cdrom 40x and soundblaster AWE64.

August : The Asus T2P4 motherboard has died on me (Aug 1999). I've tried just about everything but it keeps giving problems. I have replaced it with an Asus P5A ATX board for which I also had to buy a ATX midi case and 128 Mb of PC100 SDRAM memory (siemens 8ns). And while I was spending too much money anyway I went for a 3Dfx voodoo3 2000 AGP too. And I went for one of these fancy CPU coolers that let you read out the RPM's of the fan etc. The voodoo3 is getting really hot though, I might fit that with a fan some time. I've tried overclocking it but the results were disappointing. I set it to 160Mhz (vs. standard 143) and it was only slightly faster in Quake2/Q3test, and crashes after a short while.

In order to free up some spare parts for putting together a PC for a friend, I bought a new harddisk : an IBM DTTA 371290 : only 385,- dutch guilders!! (175 US$) I think these guys at alternate made a mistake :-) but I didn't complain. To enhance my webpage I bought a scanner : the HP 4200C with USB connection. From work I got ISDN at home and an external USB ISDN modem to make surfing faster (but mainly to be able to connect to telephone exchanges and be able to talk to the customer over the second line :-)) )

I replaced the K6-2 300 with a Celeron 333 running at 416 on an Abit ZM-6 motherboard. And to be able to print photos in a decent quality I got a printer, a HP970cxi color inkjet. I also ended up with a microsoft forcefeedback wheel and a USB hub to connect it all to my PC.

March : I have decided to buy a new PC for myself and give the existing one to my girlfriend. I bought an Athlon 1000 on an Asus A7V133 with 256MB kingston CL3 memory, a Geforce2 GTS with 32 MB DDR, a DVD rom drive (Asus DVD-E612), a CD writer Sony CRW-140, a soundblaster 128PCI and a new monitor another 19" Iiyama the A902MT.
In May I got around to upgrading the harddisks too. I bought three IBM 60GXP IC35L040. 3 identical 40GB ATA100 disks of which 2 are configured to run in RAID0 striping mode via the onboard promise IDE controller. The 2 disks combined create 1 partition of 80 Gigabyte, with almost double the throughput speed compared to a single disk.The third one is used as backup drive for any unlucky HD problem with the RAID-0 disks

because the ASUS dvd drive makes way too much noise I replaced it with a Pioneer DVD-A106 slot in model and gave the asus to a friend.

In march I got my ADSL connection so I added some network cards and setup an old P133 as an internet gateway and firewall.

In may I tried to make the main PC more silent so I replaced the processor fan with an Alpha PAL 6035 Silent and bought an Enermax 300W power supply with an adjustable fan. I destroyed the Athlon 1000 processor when installing the heatsink, so I have replaced it with an Athlon Thunderbird 1.4G. The Asus A7V133 R1.05 motherboard does not allow the current XP athlons, but a 1.4G is fast enough. I might even underclock it to reduce the temperature as it runs upto 60 degrees C

November : Added memory 512 MB CL2, making a total of 1GB. Also a 3COM officeconnect 3C16790 5 port ethernet switch to allow easy connection with the laptop.

Jan 2003 : Replaced the SB128 soundcard with a Soundblaster Live platinum to be able to experiment with outputting dolby digital sound to the HT amplifier.

March : sitecom PCMCIA CF reader and Sweex USB CF reader + 512MB CF card for laptop and camera (Canon S45, 4Mp).
August : waiting for Athlon64...
October : Replaced GeForce2 GTS with a Club3D Radeon 9800SE. This is a lowcost version of the Radeon9800pro, 325Mhz Core with 128MB 600Mhz Memory. 256bit memoryinterface, 4 pixelpipelines.
October : I have assembled a small PC that will work as always on HTTP/FTP/SSH server and IP router with slackware 8. Motherboard is a mini-itx Via epiaV10000 with a Via C3 nehemiah 1000Mhz processor. It is equiped with 256MB SDRAM onboard sound/lan/vga and a 40G IBM harddisk. I am currently still setting it up. It is meant to replace the P133 linux server/router as soon as I have mastered the configuration of it.
November : Harddisk 200G ATA Seagate

April : Athlon64 130nm Newcastle 3500+, 2x 512MB CL2.5, Asus A8VDeluxe+Wifi, BenQ DW1620, Seagate 160G SATA all built into a Lian Li PC case PC7 with Zalman powersupply and Zalman copper CPU cooler.

March : Downloading HDTV movies costs tons of harddisk space. 2 SATA Seagate 200G drives in RAID 0 mode.
September : Linksys Wifi router added. to be able to surf from the couch with the work-laptop.
October : More diskspace needed : Western Digital 320G ATA, and 2x 300G SATA Seagate and a 160G Hitachi T7K250 ATA.
A new ADSL modem Thomson 546i which delivers ADSL2+ and thereby 12Mbit download speed.
The 160G Hitachi goes into the linux Via C3 box, using samba this makes 140G of space avalable for HiDef material.

I've built a new extra PC as fileserver : Lian Li PC60+ midicase, Zalman ZM400 power supply, NEC ND3550 DVD burner, on a new mother board : Asus A8N VM-CSM micro atx. This board has everything I need on board (sound, VGA, Gbit lan, SATA2) with the Nvidia Nforce 430 chipset. performance is good with network transfer rates between 25-40Mbyte/sec. It has a new Athlon64 3000+ Venice processor and 1 GByte RAM. Initially 2x300G + 1x200G harddisks

Januari : upgrade of main PC processor to Athlon64 X2 4200+ dual core (Manchester) and 2GB of MDT CL2.5 memory. Also the power supply upgraded to Zalman ZM460 and a bigger Zalman CU7700 CPU cooler to go with it.

I am preparing a PC for my mom with the remaining parts of the previous PC (Athlon64 3500+) and another Asus A8N-VM-CSM board.

April : Extra diskspace for fileserver 2x 320G sata2 Seagate 7200.10 + a Raid card to connect it all (Highpoint Rocket Raid 2300)

August : A new graphics card for the main PC (Geforce 7800GS AGP) and a Create Labs Audigy2 soundcard. + more storage for the fileserver (2x320G Seagate 7200.10)

March : 4x 500GB Samsung HD501LJ disks for the fileserver. Took out 2x300G and put a 300G in de desktop PC.
June : Asus M2N-VM DH + Athlon64 X2 3800+ EE SFF, 35Watt, 2G MDT DDR2-800 memory + Lian Li PC60plusII case to play with Suse and other experimenting needs. two 500GB Samsung harddisks for network storage. Also a Netgear GS108 Gbit switch to be able to move the fileserver and this new PC into the attic. The experiment with Suse was short. I went back to Slackware because it does what I want it to do. Suse reminds me of the bloatware that microsoft delivers. Slackware is more barebone, do-everything-yourself and much more the way I prefer it :)

October : Replaced the main desktop PC with something a little faster : Another Lian-Li PC60 plus2 case, Gigabyte P35-DS4 motherboard, Intel Core2Duo E6750, MSI 8600GTS silent graphics card, 4GB of MDT DDR2-800 memory, three 500GB Samsung sata drives, a NEC DD writer and another Iiyama 22inch LCD monitor. With a Zalman CPU fan (CNPS9500AT) and Zalman powersupply (ZM500HP) the PC is pretty quiet. I have also bought Microsoft Vista home premium but after struggling for 2 weeks with it with almost no result (nothing old works) I reverted back to windows XP.

November : I traded the 22" IIyama with a friend an bought a new 24" model Iiyama TFT Monitor B2403WS-B1 1920x1200 resolution.

December : Added 2x750G Samsung Spinpoint F1 to the fileserver replacing 2x320G that I used to build a new PC for a friend. I also replaced the existing 3com gbit switches with netgear. The 5 port 3com was slow. I added a 750G drive to the linux PC, experimenting with LVM. Another 750G drive for the tvix 6500 network mediaplayer which should be available end of Januari.

Februari : Replaced the remaining 2x320G with 4x 750G Samsung HD753LJ disks. Moved the 2x500G to the linux PC. Juli 2008 : replaced 2x500G Samsung with 2x1TB Samsung. Bought a Sharkoon Quickport Pro to hot-plug/slide in sata harddisks. Connected via USB and/or e-sata.

I have stopped recording the addition of harddrives. They keep coming in larger sizes and more of them all the time :)

October : small low power PC to be used as router / firewall / experimental stuff : Intel Atom N330 on ION platform (motherboard Point-Of-View ION-330-1 with 4GB DDR2 Ram in a Coolermaster Centurion5 case and a Optiarc SATA DVDwriter drive.

Januari : Two new managed gbit switches Cisco SLM2008, 8 ports each. These will connect the attic to the ground floor via 2 cables using link aggregation and 3 separate vlans, internal, external xs4all and external ziggo. Ziggo internet provider added in Februari.

March : A new screen again : now 1920x1080 27" : IIyama 27" B2712HDS-B1, moved the 24" into the attic for the linux PC.

April : A new sata extension card for PCI slot : Promise FastTrak TX4310 with 4 additional sata ports to be used in the Linux firewall/webserver/NAS PC which now holds 1x 300G (boot) and 4x 1.0TB, 4x 1.5TB disks.

June : A color laser printer to replace the old inkjet printer and HP scanner. The HP CM1312nfi is a color laser printer with scanner / copier function. Also a fax is incorporated but I do not use that. It is a fully networked printer so it is accessible from all PCs.

April : Replaced the main livingroom PC with all new hardware :
Lian Li PC1020 Silver case, Asus P8P67Pro(socket 1155), CPU Core i7-2600, Gigabyte GV-R577SL-1GB graphics card, 16GB DDR3 memory, a Crucial C300 128GB SSD, 2x Seagate 2TB green harddisk a Zalman CNPS10 CPU cooler and a Bluray combo drive. Windows 7 SP1 Pro UK to run the new PC.

June : New PC speakers without subwoofer : AudioEngine P4 with AudioEngine N22 ClassD amp

June : The Atom 330 PC was sold to a colleague. It was a little too slow to do everything (SMB, NFS, Twonky) and consuming to much power to leave always-on as webserver.
I have bought a new Atom board Intel dm2800mt Cedar Trail with 2GB of DDR3 SODIMM memory and an intel 330 60GB SSD SATA600. I will set it up as router, firewall and webserver. It cannot handle more disks ;) Powersupply is a laptop powersupply that supplies 19V DC. The whole PC uses only 15 Watt while running Slackware 13.37.

December : To increase the capacity of the NAS PC and to be able to concentrate all disks in one PC I've bought a large Lian-Li case PC-D8000 that will fit 25 harddisks. I bought a Highpoint RocketRaid 2740 PCI-E-16x sas/sata controller with 16 sata interfaces and 6x 3TB disks.

June : An Asrock Z77 Pro4-M motherboard with low power (35W TDP) i3-3220t processor and 16 GB memory, to be able to set up the NAS with ZFS which needs lots of memory.

August : Another Highpoint SAS controller (HP2720SGL, 8 ports) to add more disks to the NAS PC. With 6x4TB and 2x3TB extra. Now 10x2TB, 8x 3TB and 8x 4TB in the NAS PC with ZFS on Linux.

November : A nice 27 inch Dell U2713HM high resolution screen IPS 2560x1440 and a 480GB Crucial M5 SSD for the main livingroom PC.

May : small laptop for home/travel use : Lenovo Yoga2 13-I3 with Haswell I3-4010U, 8GB memory, 500GB disk, 13.3" FullHD IPS screen. Very flexible screen that flips back completely.

May/June : I received a Highpoint Rocket Raid 2760 sata card as a gift. Very nice card with 6x SFF8087 so you can connect 24 sata harddisks to it.
I have bought a Supermicro X10SL7F serverboard (14 sata connections) with I3-4330 processor and a Lian-Li EX-H34B hotswap harddisk bay (4 in 3) to build a second Nas PC. 15 4TB seagate disks secondhand with low hours useage. I will build the PC first in an old Lian Li PC7 case with an old Zalman ZM500 power supply using an old 120GB SSD to boot Slackware and 13x 4TB disks.

May : Using the 2760 Highpoint card, some leftover 4TB disks and 2 new 4TB and 3TB disks I copied / moved / expanded the pools on the large NAS to 14x4TB, 12x3TB and 10x 2TB
June : Due to a bug (an ant actually) taking residence in the middle of my Dell U2713HM screen I replaced it with a Dell U2715HM (27" IPS 2560x1440). Sold the old Dell to a friend who did not mind the bug.
September : new server based on low power Intel Xeon D-1518 on a Supermicro X10SDV_TLN4F with 2x Gbit and 2x 10Gbe interfaces on board. Booting slackware 14.2 from a 120GB Crucial SSD. 5x 1.05TB Crucial MX300 SSD's for storage. 32GB DDR4 ECC memory. Built into a small Fractal Design Core 500 case. This machine may replace the atom64 and also serve as a host for virtualisation experimentation.
September : New Switch HP 1950-24G-2SFP+-2XGT JG960A to provide 10Gbe connections. It has 2x SFP+ and 2x RJ45 10Gbe connections, as well as 24x 1 Gbit connections.
November : Intel X520-DA2 network card with SFP+ DAC cable, to connect the riwinas2 to the new HP switch with 10Gbe speed.
December : Intel X520-DA1 network card with SFP+ DAC cable, to connect the riwinas to the new HP switch with 10Gbe speed.

March : Asrock H170M-Pro4 motherboard with Kabylake i3-7100 and 16GB DDR4 memory. Very nice Corsair RM-550x gold rated power supply. It is replacing the Linux desktop machine. And can hold the 8x sata card to host a bunch of disks temporarily when swapping data between the NAS PC's. I have moved 12x3TB disks to this machine as a test setup for ZFS.
July : 12 new Seagate Constellation 8TB disks and 1 new 4TB disk. The aim is to fill the riwinas2 with 12x8T and have 2x 14x4T in the large riwinas casing.

September : Nice portable SSD drives : 2x 500GB Samsung T5. One for work, one for private use.
November : HP usb-c G4 docking for my new work laptop. 1 usb-c gives the laptop power and provides with hdmi, DP and several USB ports.
December : New Wifi system, Asus Lyra Trio with three pods to replace the old netgear.

April : Videocard MSI RTX2060. I will convert the linuxdesktop PC into a windows10/Kodi/MadVR PC based media player. In order to be able to use the fantastic quality of HDR mapping that MadVR can do, using the RTX2060 card.
June : New 27" Dell monitor : U2719D, for the work laptop / and HP docking.
November : Netgear GS110EMX : 10 port managed ethernet switch with 2 10Gbe ports (using RJ45, UTP) and 8 1Gbe ports.
November : Intel X550-T1 10G Ethernet adapter PCIE 3.0 X4 to connect the PC to the new 10Gbe switch.
November : To replace the Windows 7 desktop with a windows 10 system that has a smaller footprint and consumes less power (31Watt) :
Asrock Z390M-ITX/AC motherboard, Intel Core i7 9700 CPU, Corsair DDR4 Vengeance LPX 2x16GB memory
Corsair SF450 PSU, Fractal Design Node 202 Mini ITX case, Noctua NH-L9i CPU cooler
Samsung 970 EVO 1TB M.2 SSD

June : Highpoint SAS controller (HP2720SGL, 8 ports), second hand with 2 SFF8087 breakout cables.
August : Intel X550-T1 10G Ethernet adapter PCIE 3.0 X4 (previous card bought 2019-04 broke) replacement.
October : New motherboard/CPU/Memory for the Linux Desktop PC : Asrock B365M Pro4, Intel I3-9100, Corsair 2x8GB DDR4 memory. To rebuild the linux desktop of which hardware went to the HTPC and to be able to connect the 12x3T disks that were lying around.

October : 4x Raspberry Pi 4B with 4GB ram to build a small Kubernetes cluster, with external SSD (Verbatim VX500 (120GB) and 4x Sandisk extreme 3.0 64/32GB USB sticks and a small 8 port hp switch.

Januari : Fiber connection 100/100Mbit. new Fritzbox 7590 modem
March : Replace powersupply in linux desktop with Corsair RM550x
April : New 10Gbe network card Intel X550-T1 10G Ethernet adapter PCIE 3.0 X4 for future use.
September : Graphics card for HTPC : Asus Tuf gaming Geforce RTX3060ti V2 OC edition

December : Laptop Lenovo Thinkbook 14s Yoga gen 3 with Intel Core I5-1335U, 16GB memory, 512GB SSD