It looks very much like a 1981-ish IBM PC, and the dot-matrix printer looks a little like one I had at about that time, but I can't remember what make it was. (Epson? I have an Epson from a couple of years later in my loft.)
I'm pretty sure those 3M disk boxes are for 5¼" floppies, definitely of that era. I don't think I had more than a couple of those boxes-worth[1] of discs, at that time, so with at least three (and probably a few more, even if still just DD at 360KB a shot) he's a bit more data-heavy than I was then.
The screen is a mystery, because it seems very graphics-heavy, may be (could be image artefacts) in colour, and with white background is very atypical of the era. Maybe an early DTP package, but I was still on monochrome[2], leastwise on the PC[3], so it isn't something I would have seen much of. It does have the appearance of a web-page, actually, but the grain of the photo (what can be seen through scanning and JPEG conversion artefacts), the clothing, the watch (if not a black plastic-strapped Casio, something along the same lines) also suggests the '80s (and suited to a not obviously and outrageously rich geek-type), thus also before the Web[4].
From the looks of various other things, it seems to be an American locale, but that's just an unscientific assessments of the aforesaid clothes, glasses, haircut, facial hair, cigarette packet (I think) under the monitor, furniture and of course the (if I've identified it correctly) phone-socket through which our nerd/geek/whateverhewantstocallhimself is accessing the outside world. Not to mention that this is the most likely place to be using a dial-up computer at this time. But all I can really say is that it doesn't look British. (The wood panelling on the wall might have been ubiquitous to the UK... Not so much something noticed in the '80s, but noticed in the 90s as being a sign you're in a room not properly re-furnished since the '80s.) There's also a vague possibility in the back of my mind that it's West Germany or somewhere in Scandinavia (with good enough central heating/right time of year to allow the casual short sleeves!), which just goes to show how vague my memories of the era are.
Unfortunately, I can't see exactly what's on the top of the monitor. I seem to have left my Blade Runner-style photo analyser/enhancer/re-angler but I feel that if we could read the writing on the whatever-it-is it might help place things, as would a better view of the screen's contents. Just in case it was a '90s photo showing someone surfing the web on early '80s equipment. (Or through an early '80s-style monitor just happened to be placed on top of an early '80s-style machine, but being connected to a far more modern machine under the desk, possibly hidden behind the early '80s printer.) Ditto for the visible bit of whatever is hanging/stuck on the wall at the top of the photo.
In other words, I don't know, and the above is just composed of partially educated guesses at best.
[1] Plus a whole lot of cassettes, but that was for the ZX81 and later the BBC model B...
[2] Green-on-black, at that time, and in fact until the 1990s I was still using a monochrome Hercules graphics card, comparatively good resolution and shade-range, but still green-on-black ultimately.
[3] Also ZX81, but the BBC was colourful.
[4] Though not, of course, the Internet, or Fidonet, so it could be a pre-Web graphical bulletin-board of some kind.
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Topic: Who is this guy? (Read 1159 times)