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Getting close to Christmas always reminds me of looking through the Argos catalogue for gifts.

Luckily for nostalgic people like me, there’s an archive of the Argos catalogue from the mid-nineties.

Back in the 1990s, when I was using a BBC Micro, I had a couple of books with printed code (some kind of BASIC variant, I think) that could be typed in to produce games.

A lot of the time they didn’t fully work, but I distinctly remember a skiing game that I mostly got working. I could ski and dodge obstacles for a short time before it crashed, anyway.

Of course, it used to take so long to type the code in that I probably made mistakes through impatience and by not paying attention.

These kind of programs would also show up in computing magazines.

Some favorite BBC Micro games that I didn’t have to type in were “Repton” and “Ghouls”. These games were loaded from a cassette.

I used to modify PC cases. I would spray paint beige cases silver or black, install toggle switches for fans, cut big windows in the case side and mount a piece of perspex, finishing it off with a bit of car window trim. I’d install cold cathode lighting so you could see inside. Blue and green were my favorite colors.

There were some good online suppliers of fan guards that would replace the standard grill with a laser-cut biohazard or dragon shape. There was a whole range. They looked great over LED fans.

I used to buy most of my modding supplies from DIY stores and car repair places. I once went to a hobby store to see if I could fit a PC’s internals into the plastic shell of a toy car, but I didn’t get far with that one.

I did manage to build a PC into a metal briefcase. I added a switch that required a key to turn it on.

The first computer I could really call my own was an Amstrad PCW9512. It was a word processor from 1985 that ran an operating system called CP/M. It booted from a disk as it had no internal hard drive.

It had a daisy-wheel printer that was extremely loud, as it was essentially an electric typewriter.

I learned BASIC on the Amstrad and used it to program my first text-based games.

The first useful BASIC program I wrote on the PCW was an address book. It wasn’t advanced enough to read data from a file, so it was a mess of GOTO statements that made for very basic name lookup. I was an absolute beginner.

I had a program named Dr Logo which could draw lines on the screen. It was possible to use loops to generate multiple lines and create shapes, like a digital spirograph.

I don’t have the PCW9512 anymore, but I do have a PCW8526 that still works perfectly.

In the early 2000s, I would go to a computer fair at the Bowlers Exhibition Centre in Manchester. It was held on Saturdays.

Before the organizers started cracking down, it was a fantastic source of less-than-legitimate software. You could also buy compilations of freeware and demos on floppy disk and CD.

Back when they were popular, people were selling desktop themes on floppy disk. I paid £1 for an X-Files theme once. It was great.

Bowlers was the first place I saw the Johnny Castaway screensaver being used to demo monitors. Excellent screensaver.

There was plenty of hardware for sale, too. When I was building my first PC, Bowlers was where I bought my first motherboard.

There was always a huge selection of PC cases with plastic windows and lights, LED fans, EL wire, that sort of stuff.

Very fond memories of that place.

I consider the old Internet to have faded away by the mid-2000s, but the Internet of the late 90s was marvelous.

We had the absolutely brilliant Geocities, which allowed anyone with an idea to create their own website. The modern world often looks back on these websites as poorly designed, but that was the charm of it. People were expressing themselves through colors, textured backgrounds, animated gifs, and “website under construction” buttons.

My first Geocities website was a small collection of paranormal stories and images that I found interesting.

Webrings were a huge part of how Geocities websites linked together by theme. I would spend hours just browsing Halloween prop making websites through their webrings.

Website owners could submit for and win awards, which were little graphics they could display. Granted, these were mostly just to generate backlinks for the award givers, but they were still fun.

Besides Geocities, old Internet websites just felt unique and experimental. They were rough around the edges. Things didn’t always work and that was ok. Before businesses really relied on their websites, there was a lot more room to have fun with them.

In the early days of Google, even the average person could get their website to rank for keywords with a little effort. I used to browse Usenet group for tips frequently.