Not so ancient History

I would come back to the Dragon from time to time, particularly the late 90's, when I hoarded collected a lot of gear. This ended up being stored at my sister's house and then more or less forgotten about. Years passed, I moved house a couple of times, I got married, my son was born and my caffeine addiction became ever deeper.

A little over three years ago, my sister suggested to me that I really should think about moving all the stuff that I'd been hoarding storing in her house, to, for example, somewhere that was not in her house.

That was a bit of a problem. There wasn't room in my house for all my stuff. It's a mountain of old computers and associated junk that you can't just sneak into the spare room. It will be noticed and questions will be asked. Questions that don't have easy answers. I prefer to avoid those kinds of questions so that I can stay in my happy place.

Then I had an idea. I would board up the loft to make storage space. We could tidy up the spare room and make it into a guest room, and, you know, put one or two things up the loft that my sister had kindly been storing for me. Everyone's a winner.

So that's what I did, and then I made several car trips to collect all my forgotten treasure. There was a lot of stuff. There were examples of every generation of PC from XT to Pentium, monitors, printers, disk drives, hard drives, BBC micros, Amiga, Atari ST, Enterprise 64, disks, cassettes, magazines, books, sausages, hash browns, eggs, beans, mushrooms, bacon. Sorry, it's nearly the weekend and I've had muesli every morning this week.

Where was I? Oh yes: What really grabbed my interest was the Dragon collection. As I checked out the contents of each box, I began to remember how much enjoyment I used to get out of this peculiar machine. I couldn't wait to get some more free time to power up these old computers and find out if they were still working.

In the meantime I would have a look at the interwebs to see if I could turn up anything Dragon related. I was pleasantly surprised to find The Dragon Archive. This is a site that has amassed a tremendous amount of Dragon software, magazines, ROM images etc., has a wiki for everything Dragon and a forum where there were actual people, with actual Dragons, talking about actual Dragon stuff, like it was a normal thing to do. I wanted in!