A very evocative item on the BBC New Magazine website at the moment, reminiscing about the ZX81. Ahhh, good times!
It was my first computer. I still remember excitedly going to WH Smiths in Leicester to buy it - November 1981!
That got me hooked on computers and a few months later I was buying its big brother, the ZX Spectrum. This was announced, if memory serves, around April 1982 but didn"t actually start shipping in significant numbers until a couple of months later. I remember pawing over the glossy, embossed brochure longingly, almost salivating at the prospect! Sad but true!
By now I was really into computers and avidly consumed information on their workings. I had a book which disassembled the Spectrum"s ROM and I studied it until I knew how it worked in a lot of areas like getting keyboard input and outputting characters to the screen.
I bought loads and loads of games for it. I had a draw almost full of them. I also bought loads of add-ons for it - "proper" keyboard, sound generator, speech synthesiser etc. I also had a modem and subscribed to Micronet with access to Prestel - an early forerunner of the internet I suppose. This would have been around "85/"86. Being single, living at home with lots of disposable income ftw!
By now I was a confirmed Sinclair fan and got my mitts on the Spectrum"s successor, the Sinclair QL.
This was (laughably) described as a business computer. I was very "into" this for a start but my interest started to wane a little as it coincided with me discovering the pleasures of beer drinking. Well, I"d already discovered that, perhaps excess beer drinking would be more accurate
My love affair with computers continued but my initial ardent fervour and passion
had subsided and was now more of a workaday, utilitarian relationship. Beer was now my first love.
To fill in the blanks, after the QL I got an Amiga which I didn"t really ever get into.
I then got an Amstrad PCW which got a fair bit of use. I believe this ran the CP/M operating system and was getting close to the realms of today"s PCs.
After this I bought my first PC at the end of "91. I went for future-proofing (lol) with a massive 4MB of RAM and an 80MB hard disk!
I"ve lost track now of my various PC puchases and upgrades but there"s probably been about half a dozen different desktops pass through the lounge. I resisted getting a laptop for ages but eventually succumbed about 3 years or so ago. I can"t imagine being without one now.
