Back in 1998, I was 13 years old and had no money to buy a computer. But that wouldn’t stop me. I didn’t care if I had a brand new computer or a used one, all I wanted was a computer. From the conversations of adults around me, I heard it was common for businesses to renew their hardware and throw their old computers into the trash. So I figured, all I had to do was to be in the right trash at the right time, or even better, make the trash come to me. In these years, there were tons of computer paper magazines, so I decided to send a letter to one of them, of which I have now forgotten the name, to publish an ad in their classified section: “13 year-old student in the Paris area, will come to your home or office to get any computers you are about to throw in the bin”. From this classified, I got a 486DX-80 PC, a printer, and a Hector HR2+ computer.
The 486DX-80 and the printer have served me well, and are long gone. Last summer, while visiting my family in France I decided to take a look into the attic. As I was making my way through rusty nails and spider webs, I noticed a bag covered with dust in a dark corner of the room. I had the feeling that I was about to make a very good discovery, and I was not disappointed. I opened the bag with excitement, and there it was, the almighty Hector 2HR+ computer!
In the bag came all the booklets, cables, and cassettes, so I decided that I would spend the afternoon writing code on that machine, and that I would run this code before nightfall. But before I go any further on that, a bit of history about the Hector 2HR+…