╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ SYSTEM::OPERATOR PROFILE ║ ║══════════════════════════════════════════════════║ ║ Handle: ikari ║ ║ Real name: Cezar Pokorski ║ ║ Location: Cracow, Poland ║ ║ System: Schneider CPC6128 (1st computer) ║ ║ Status: ONLINE ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
I'm Cezar, known online as ikari. By day I'm a software engineer — a job that lets me hope to one day pay off the debts made doing retro-tech ADHD shopping at night.
I've been an Amstrad user since the age of 4. My dad booted up some games for me, I discovered that random key combinations make the computer do things, he praised me for it, and that was probably the defining moment for the rest of my life. I still have that CPC6128, and my original disks.
I played NES, but the Amstrad stayed my main computer until I was 12 or 13, when I could finally switch to a PC and graduate from coding in BASIC to coding in Delphi. If you're Polish and ever used PolChat in the early 2000s — you may know me from the chat client I wrote in junior high.
Not much of a gamer
Interestingly enough, I was never much of a gamer — even with the Amstrad, the meeting point of hardware and software always fascinated me more. How the computer operates. How diskettes work internally. How a dot matrix printer transfers your words from computer memory to paper, 9 dots at a time.
I loved word processors. Probably always wanted to be a writer — or as you say today, a content creator.
In primary school, while friends had Pentium IIIs with GeForce cards, I used the Amstrad and my dot matrix printer to publish my own computer magazine for friends. It shared a lot of "how does it work" — I remember redrawing the schematics of laser printer internals, or communication buses, from an actual reputable magazine (RIP) into Art Studio on the Amstrad, and fitting the drawings into the gaps in the text in Tasword.
Not much has changed
Except today I was able to expand my collection to all the CPCs and get a PCW too, and then a few other important 8-bits and 16-bits. But I still want to share both the passion and the "how does it work", with parallels and history timelines on how all of that still drives the computers we use today, in many ways.
I have cluttered my home office with computer equipment to half the height of the room, so I am too ashamed to try to make YouTube videos in this setting. But I can still share articles!
If you want to understand where the passion comes from, the first post on this site explains it in detail.
Find me elsewhere
- @RetroFunPL on Mastodon — retro computing posts
- @ikari on Mastodon — non-retro ramblings
- RetroFunPL on YouTube — when I get brave enough
- ikari-pl on GitHub — including konCePCja (CPC emulator), and the Go port of the CPC image converter