What Was Your Favourite Computer Over the Years?

What Was Your Favourite Computer Over the Years?

Perhaps we have lost our love for computers? Often we just treat them as if they are just a part of the furniture these days. There’s no more wonderment about them. There’s no more magic about buying them. They are just bland machines that allow us to do our work. And that mobile phone in your pocket? Well, that involved decades of solid research, but we just take its GPS, video streaming, messaging, Internet browsing and all the other amazing services for granted.

Inside we are billions of transistors working together to access an almost infinite amount of information, but we just treat them as bits of silicon, glass and plastic. But, ask many people of a certain age about their favourite computer, and it’s there’s a good chance it will be this one:

So, let’s ask Professor Alan Woodward:

So why is the BBC Micro held in such high regard? Well, I appreciate it was a bunch of wireless and chips, but it had a soul, and with it came a vision of the future. For the first time, computers were not run by people with white lab coats but could be used by anyone. And for the first time your didn’t need a million dollar budget to write code.

Perhaps, too, it was the first computer that we used to program with, or perhaps it was the grand vision of teaching a whole generation about how to program, and thus create a new generation of coders. And, what happened? Well, the great work of the BBC Micro has faded, and we have not taught a whole generation to code — in fact, Computer Science at school has dropped faster than most of the subjects taught. It is perhaps a continual failing of our education system to not even acknowledge that software and data now drive our world.

But, let’s hope we can find ways to show the next generation that computers are fun! People like Mark Logan in Scotland, though, want to change this, and wake politicians up to the fact that we need to produce a generation who actually understand technology rather than use it. This is a new age, and the industrial age is receding into the past. Whichever countries can produce a tech-driven workforce will be the leaders of our future. And the rest will be purely consumers of knowledge, rather than generating it.

For me? My favourite computers were my trusty Macbook Pro 2015 and the Sun 3 series computer:

My Macbook saw me through so many pen testing demos and had all the ports that I needed. In fact, a few of my recent Macbook has failed, especially with their horribly flawed keyboards, but my 2015 series computer is still going strong. And, for the Sun 3, I learn C and Unix properly. So, I know these don’t have a soul, but it felt like it.

If you are interested, I now use a Raspberry PI running Linux Kali for my cybersecurity demos, as it is so dependable. If you want to see it in action, come along to our cybersecurity showcase on 2 March: