I had these very old photos lying around and scanned them. This was my desk in my room around 1993. The computer on the left is an MSX2 (a Philips NMS 8280). The other one is a Commodore Amiga 500 with a 1084S display.

On the shelf to the right there were a few boxes of floppy disks containing several hundreds of them. (Click to enlarge)

Philips NMS 8280 with an FM-PAC clone and Philips’ Music Module. I used the cassette deck to amplify the sound from the MSX2. (Click to enlarge)

How about yours? Do you also have photos of your old computers?

Last night I learnt that Ángel Cortés has just passed away. He was 58 years old, and one of the pioneers of Internet in Spain.

We first met in the early 90s, years before Internet access became popular or even easily available in Spain. At the time he was running NeXuS MSX BBS from his home, the only BBS in the country dedicated to MSX computers. I used to dial into his BBS from my MSX2 computer using a 300 bps modem. With his help I later started my own BBS and FidoNet node (LuzNET 2 BBS, 2:343/163).

During the late 90s we worked together at Intercom, back then one of Spain’s biggest Internet service providers. There he started Noticias Intercom, which later became noticias.com. It was one of the biggest news site in Spanish. He also started noticies.com, one of the first news sites in Catalan.

In 2002 he left Grupo Intercom. He asked me for help to start his own news portal: NoticiasDot. We actually ran the whole thing from a server in my Tokyo apartment for about two years, until we moved everything to a hosting company. I was helping him with all the technical stuff until around 2008.

In short, he’s the person who introduced me to computer networks and communications. If I hadn’t met him I probably wouldn’t be where I am today.

Thanks for everything, Angel.

We’re spending the weekend in Hakone with the family. Last time I came here was probably April last year, if I remember correctly. It suddenly started snowing a lot on the way to the hotel, and now it is sunny again.

It’s going to be an interesting weekend.

Let me tell you a little secret about myself: I can sense the ghosts of dead people, and I’m not using a metaphor here. I really mean ghosts, or souls, or spirits of other dead people. Call them whatever you want. I can feel them, and they used to scare the shit out of me.

This started when I was a kid. The apartment where my parents raised me had a badly-lit corridor with the living room on one end, my parents’ bedroom on the other, and my own bedroom and a bathroom in between. Often, on my way back from the bathroom, I would have a slight feeling that someone was behind me, just standing there looking at my back. I would turn, and each and every time I was unable to see anyone or anything. However, I felt, I knew there was somebody there, some presence staring at me. I would hurry up, run back to my room, and close the door behind me.

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