Greetings y'all! My name is Adrian, and even when I haven't touched a physical MSX since the 90s, and I have known the website for 15 years. It was about time to create an account, even when I am not usually much of a forums user ;-)
As a kid I was allowed to play with my father's «old» computer as soon as he moved over to PCs: an aging Sony HB-75P. One day it started failing, and despite my whiny requests to take it to the repair shop, it ended up in the trash bin.
My childhood memories include spending many afternoons impatiently waiting for some game to load from the tape, while eating a sandwich after school. And spending way too much time playing Polar Star. At some point we also had Jet Set Willy, and it was a BeeCard edition, which my neighbour—who had a Spectrum—found mesmerizing because one could play without waiting. He ended up coming over often to play video games.
The other cart we had was MSX-LOGO, which was my first contact with some form of “programming”. I never thought about the Basic interpreter as something to write programs on back in the time: my impression was that this was only the thing one needed to use to get stuff loaded from tapes. Yet here I am, three decades later, working as a programmer doing Free/Libre Software.
I haven't really done much related to the MSX in the last thirty years other than learning some assembler, packaging fMSX for some Linux distributions, and being astonished at all the community projects which keep the platform alive to this day (specially the hardware ones!).
For years I have been toying with the idea of buying a second hand MSX computer; but the plan has only become a real option in the last few months… and that's my story. I'll be looking at the trading subforums ;-)
Cheers!
(P.S: While most MSX stuff we used to have is long gone, I think the BeeCard and its cartridge might still be at my parents' basement, some day I'll get round to combing through it.)
