Ireland from a Polish perspective

Today, working on archaeological excavation site, and listening to the Polish radio station Internet stream broadcast using my 3G Vodafone Brodband card and my Nokia N73 I have realised how things changed since I have touched the magic keyboard 22 years ago.

Despite of some of common opinions that behind the Iron Curtain we didn’t have electricity and television (yes, some people asked me for that ) we were using computers, of course the amount of them was limited, but they were present in our life in the nineteen eighties . My first meeting with the computer was in 1985. My mum has been working in kind of a cultural and activity centre for kids and youth. Once a week there was a something like a event called “meet the computer”, when one guy was showing us his own Commodore C 64 with tape recorder. Couple of months later I signed up for my first computer course, which was programming in Commodore C64 BASIC. In the same year I became a member of computer club in the same culture centre. There was 10 kids working on one ZX Spectrum Plus with a black and white TV and very nasty old tape recorder. Actually, one of the first games on ZX Spectrum I ever played was related to Irish mythology, the game was titled “Dun Darach” and was about adventures of CuChulainn.

The amount of computers in Poland was rising instantly, but all of them were imported from the Western Europe avoiding bans and Polish custom officers on the border. Our communistic regime realised that the society need computers and nothing can stop it. They decide to import some of the computers, they decided to bring Timex 2048 and 3 models of Atari computers - Atari 800 XL, Atari 65 XE and Atari 130 XE. Timex computers were an American clone of ZX Spectrum, and were available in Scout Shops (special shops for scouts). Atari computers were available in special dollar shops. Among the usually empty regular shops we had a special shops full of western goods, where you could pay only with Dollars, Pounds, Deutsche Marks etc.

8 bit computers in Poland ruled by communistic regime computers were also kind of resistance. Our special police couldn’t catch you when you were playing Green Beret (American commando in Soviet base), Rambo, Commando or the most ridiculous game - Ride Over Moscow (where Russia was shown as a kind of enormous military base with no place for towns, cities and ordinary people ) 8 bit computers connected with simple printers were also a great opportunity to print resistance and Solidarity bulletins.

In 1986 my mum bought me my first computer - Atari 65 XE. Unfortunately, she couldn’t afford a special, dedicated Atari tape recorder, so for the first couple of months I was to type all the programs I wanted to run. After couple of months I got my tape recorder and I was in heaven.

At that time there was no copyright regulations so all the games and applications were brought from the West and copied thousand times between computer users, usually on kind of computer market fairs that took place every Sunday in one of the schools.

In 1988 during the one of the fairs I saw for the very first time Commodore Amiga and Atari 520 ST. 16 bit computers with unbelievable graphics and sounds. In 1991 I got both of them.

It was short after collapse of the communism and new Poland was open for everything, and of course for computers and new technologies. About 1993 - 1994 PC computers started to supplant Commodore Amiga and Atari ST, however many people were still using Commodore C64, ZX Spectrum or Atari 65 XE as a simple game consoles.

In 1993 it was trendy to have Windows 3.1 installed, despite average hard disc space in Polish PCs was about 40MB. The explosion of PC boom in Poland started with the introduction of VGA graphic cards, that gave people opportunity to play nice and interesting games. I remember Secrets of Monkey Island, Dune, Dune II and some other titles.

About that time, Poland gained access to World Wide Web - Internet. Couple of years later Polish Telecom introduced free (not really) access modem connection. You were charged only for minutes of connection. People were spending fortunes.

In the late 1997 I bought my first PC, it was Pentium 166 Mhz MMX with 32 MB Ram and 2,1 GB HD with a simple s3 VGA graphic card and of course with internet modem. I had illegal Windows 95 SE installed. I was dreaming about broadband - cable connection, even very slow but cable. I got it 3 years later in year 2000 from Polish Telecom and it was ADSL. 2,5 years ago I got my first laptop with GPRS data card and flat charge (15 Eu / month without limits), and 1 year ago I got 3G Broadband from Vodafone.

And now? My mobile Nokia N73 has 10000 times better graphics and sound than many computers I used to have, moreover with my 3G Vodafone broadband data sim card it is my mobile internet radio player and mobile browser.

10 years ago, when I was in Scotland I could afford to call my mum or my wife once a day for 2 - 3 minutes, and now I can talk with my wife for hours using Skype or other VOIP programs.

Where do we go from here?

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