hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4666.txt

Episode: 4666
Title: How I got into tech
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4666/hpr4666.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:16:15 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4666, for 2026-06-22
Today's show is entitled, "How I got into tech"
The host is Lennart Benschop and the duration is 00:19:00
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Lennart describes the computers he used, what he ran on them and what he liked about them."
How I got into tech. I'm Leonard Benzgrub and I live in the Netherlands and I'm an embedded software engineer.
I arrived late at the party. Our first home computer we got in 1984 when I was 17 years old.
And that was a used Texas Instruments T999 for a.
Before that I was exposed to home computers.
ZX81 with a flight simulator. It really blew me away. That was at all possible.
Primitive as it was at that time.
And then the T999 for a. We had some very cool games on it.
Like Porosheck, Munchman, Beckman Klohn, TI invaders.
We had basic in Rome, but the basic didn't give access to all features of the hardware.
So there were hardware sprites in the video chip, but there was no way to get at them.
There was no peek and poke. You could poke machine code programs.
If you printed it always printed on the bottom of the screen and made the screen scroll up.
So you couldn't move the cursor to the top line of the screen on half-way the screen and print something there.
And that was very annoying. You could print single characters via some cool commands.
But not complete strings. So you had to split those strings into characters.
And that was too slow to be usable for flashy games.
You could really find the shapes of the characters. You could find colors.
So you could make some very cool looking screens.
But it was just not fast enough for really interesting games.
And then you knew there were hundred sprites.
And you could buy extended basic with the sprite support built in.
You could buy a mini memory module that allowed you to poke machine code programs into memory.
What the other machines like the set X81 or the fake 20 could do out of the box.
You could do that when you bought an expensive module.
But no money for either of them. So the fun was over a rather soon.
And a year and a half later in 1995 I started my study at the Ain'thoven University of Technology, Electrical Engineering.
And there we had Pascal on mainframes. We learned programming in Pascal.
And soon I was able to buy a zedic spectrum.
That has a rubber keyboard that 48 kilobytes of RAM.
It worked with set tapes, television, just like the old.
The I machine did. But it had Z80.
And you could really program that thing in machine code.
You could poke everywhere in RAM you like.
And it had some better commands in basic to do interesting things on the screen.
You could draw lines, you could draw circles, you could print strings anywhere on the screen.
You wanted that was not so limited.
But the basic was indeed very slow on that machine.
What you could add some machine code routines to make that faster.
It was a very nice machine.
I already had master basic on the TI.
I mastered spectrum basic.
I mastered assembly language.
There was that book.
The complete spectrum from this assembly that told you what every line of code in the ROM.
The basic ROM did.
How it did it. Why it did it.
It was better reference manual for computer than anything you could think of.
So if you wanted to know how to load a block of data from cassette,
you knew where to jump it to ROM.
What register should you have to set and what to expect from it.
That was really nice for programming stuff in machine code.
Early 1986, we had a course with an 80, 85 single board computer.
That 80, 85 is basically an 80, 80 instruction set.
This is the 80 of the set of spectrum.
As a superset of the 80 and instructions set.
So I was already familiar with those instructions.
I only had to use different assembly language manuals
because they differ between the Z80 and the 8080.
But I already got a good start.
It was already familiar with those instructions.
So I enjoyed that course.
One of the few.
In 1987, I wanted to run fourth on the ZX Spectrum.
I read about fourth in some magazines, in some books.
I really liked the idea of that language.
And I ended up writing my own fourth for the ZX Spectrum.
Not once but twice in 1988.
I wrote a second fourth for that ZX Spectrum.
Using a true meta-compiler, compiling it from the first fourth.
I compiled a second fourth and it had a build in a sembler.
And all the good stuff that a good fourth should have.
And at that time, I already had the 128k model
with hard keycaps, not the rubber keyboard
that your original set of Spectrum had.
And 128k RAM.
And I had micro drives for you.
Micro drives are tiny tape cartridges with an endless tape loop.
You can use them like a floppy disk.
You can list the directory, you can open files, etc.
Sequential read and write speed is quite good.
Comparable to real floppy disks.
You don't have a sick time, but your rotational delay is very long
because you have that single long tape loop.
The reliability and media cost are terrible.
In August 1988, I bought my first PC,
and 88 based PC in XT class machine.
With no hard disk at the time, just to floppy drives.
But the thing had a monochrome monitor,
green screen long afterglow.
It was very pleasing to read from that screen.
Very stable picture.
And you had gorgeous text quality compared to anything else
on the market at that time.
And that was a real good thing.
Real floppy drives, real, real keyboard.
Basic, you couldn't use graphics commands because GW-based didn't know
how to do circular graphics.
I ran four on the PC as well.
First, F83 by Lexington and Perry.
Later, FPC by Tom Zimmer.
FPC had a great editor built in.
A great text editor, I used it for other text editing as well.
I am a matrix printer with that machine.
I even used it with latte, the word processing system for scientific papers
that uses ASCII as input files.
You run it to a compiler.
And then you get the DVI file that you can either view on the screen
or convert to post script or sense to a printer.
A nine pin dot matrix printer.
It's very slow.
It has to pass three times over each line to get something that looks readable.
It's still ugly.
That was latte in those days.
If you didn't have laser printer.
And on the PC XT, it was really, really slow.
I did have a hard disk at that time.
1990.
I had that hard disk.
In 1992, I bought my first 386 machine.
Four whole megabytes.
25 megahertz.
386.
DX.
VGA screen.
Tape provide screen.
Still monochrome.
A 100 megabyte hard disk.
And that machine got to run Linux.
At that time, I worked as a research assistant at the I.D.
University.
I could download the floppy images from the FTP site of Manchester University in England,
MCC interim lilies.
What was later to be called the first Linux distro.
The word distro didn't exist yet.
It didn't have a graphical user interface.
No XV in those systems.
But it did have great terminal support.
It had a real seconfiler.
The GNU utilities.
They were quite good already at that time.
Several text editors via I clone Joe,
which was roughly like the
word star or turbo to skull editor that everybody used at that time.
And I really liked Linux already in 1992.
A few months later, I replaced that system with SLS,
which did have the XV in those systems.
At that time, it meant 640 by 480 pixels.
Strictly monochrome bitmap.
That was the only thing my video card supported.
And I only used it for the DVI viewer or to view the output of ghost script.
I had Latak on Linux at that time.
I've used it ever since.
Programmed for that machine.
I contributed to some forts that were being developed for Unix.
There was GNU Fort G Fort.
There was a PIV written by German.
Portable Fort environment.
I also had a 6809 simulator that I originally wrote in FPC.
FPC on the PC.
XT was really slow.
Then I forwarded it to the simulator to see.
And then it was lot faster but not nearly as fast as the real CPU would be.
I really liked the 6809 architecture.
I never had owned a machine that had one.
But I still liked that 6809 CPU.
In 1995, I bought Pentium with 8 megabytes of RAM.
That didn't stay 8 megabytes for long because 8 megabytes was too little.
I had one gigabyte of hardest space.
The decent video card and a column monitor.
So I could run a graphical desktop.
And of course the Pentium machine was way faster than the 3806 was.
Especially with floating point.
Floating point was terrible on the 3806 by any standards.
Originally the Pentium ran slacker.
Slacker 3.0 from a CD ROM drive.
That was also a new thing in that Pentium machine.
And I tried reddit on it.
Debian.
In 1998, I got a Pentium 2 machine with way more memory like 64 meg.
And bigger hardest.
And a CD recorder.
So I could burn my own CDs.
It was only in 2001 that I got cable internet broadband internet.
Before that, I had been on dial-up.
When I still worked at university, I had access to the network there.
But in the home, I only had dial-up.
And that was too slow to download Linux distribution CD images.
That wasn't possible.
But now we dial up and with cable internet it was possible.
So I didn't have to mail order this CD ROMs.
I could just burn my own.
So I could try out 3BSD.
And any other distros I liked to test like reddit.
But I came back to Debian several times.
In 2003, I started to use Gen2 Linux.
I bought a Pentium 4 at that time.
And I also had a Pentium 3.
And I ran Gen2 Linux on both these machines.
Later I got a Mac Mini.
The first one with PowerPC.
That also had Gen2 Linux.
And in Gen2 Linux, you have complete control over how you compile your programs.
You have to compile all your programs.
You can specify what options you want for them.
It gets your great control.
But it also requires a lot of your time.
I really spent a lot of time when I had those Gen2 systems running.
But I wasn't Gen2 for many years.
In 2006, I got my first quarter to dual machine.
The first 64 bit PC.
I had 64 bit Gen2 on it along with 32 bit PowerPC.
And 32 bits X86.
A few years later I switched back to Debian.
I used Debian a lot, 2012.
I bought a new I-Fee Bridge generation Core i7 machine.
The first year to run Ubuntu because Debian didn't have to drive us.
I needed for sound and for ethernet and stuff.
And Ubuntu had that out of the box.
But when Debian advanced, got a new version.
I switched back to Debian on that machine.
That one also got an SSD.
It was only 120 gigabytes.
I had a spinning rust hard disk of two terabytes alongside it.
But the SSD was only 120 gigabytes at that time.
But yeah, it was real speed of boot times and start-up times through programs.
That really made a difference.
From spinning rust hard disk to a SSD.
At the same time, I had also an EPC the very first generation.
At the only 512 megabytes of RAM.
4 gigabytes of internal flash storage.
I still have it.
Earlier this year, I ran out by Linux on it.
Everything works except for the Wi-Fi chips.
I have to connect it to the internet network.
And of course you can't run serious web browsers like Firefox or Chromium on it.
So it's pretty useless for internet browsing or for much else.
But yeah, it's still cool that you can still run it on a modern operating system.
I've got the first Raspberry Pi.
I've got the Raspberry Pi 400 to 400.
It's built into a keyboard.
And it runs a Bluetooth and it's quite usable even.
And in 2022, I bought an Intel Note 12th generation Core i5 CPU 32 gigabytes.
At that time, it was a no-brainer.
You just just a few tenths of bugs more.
And now it's solid gold prices.
So you wouldn't buy 32 gigabytes of RAM for such a machine.
That run Ubuntu at first too.
Later I switched to Debian.
Really like Debian.
For a daily job, I have Windows 11 laptop for the office.
And for logging into the remote machines to remote machines.
Some of them do run Linux.
I really use Linux at my daily job too.
That was it for today.
That's all I had to say.
See you next episode.
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