My first computer

CanonV20 3

This is an image of my first computer, the Canon V-20, an MSX 1 compatible. My father bought it for me in 1988 or thereabouts, at a Dutch discount store called Kwantum. It came with a small, fosforescent green Philips screen.

Near the top of the machine, to the right of the Canon logo, it had a cartridge slot that you could use to play games. Basically you rammed the cartridges straight into the motherboard. Sometimes it required quite a bit of force. You could hear the printed circuit boards grind and gnash as they joined.

We played lots of Konami games. Nemesis, Hyper Sports, Yie Ar Kung-Fu.

The cartridges were expensive. Later on I got a tape recorder. There were lots of cheap bargain bin games on tape. They took ages to load and often you would have to load them 2 or 3 times before they would work right. The tape recorder wasn’t very good.

At some point the tape recorder started eating tapes. One of the tapes became so tangled up inside the recorder that I had to cut it up to get it out. My father tried splicing the tape back together with transparent duct tape, but of course the game never ran again.