This Brought A Nostalgic Tear To My Eye :)

culpepper

I had the 48k speccy. It was £125 when I bought mine. I used to read the manual at work and then go home and spend all evening programming it. The audio cables would fail on a regular basis and it was useless until you bought new ones because you had to save onto cassettes and when they(cables) failed,all your carefully typed listings would get lost in oblivion.
We still had it when my son was little and he began his IT lessons using it at home to learn basic programming.
One of my colleagues at work was a computer buff and he showed me his first computer which was bought in kit form and built in a 5 X 4 photographic-paper box.It had no display and used LED's to show it was working.

patman99

My first computer was a ZX81. Followed by a BBC model B, Dragon 32 (still have), Atari 520ST, Amiga A500, Amiga A1200 (I equiped it with a 15GB HD and a Blizzard 8Mb Ram upgrade), Finally made the leap to PC in 1996 when I purchased a P166-powered desktop. The Amiga was much, much faster than the PC at gaming and video. Also had in the house an Acorn Archimedes A300, now there was a truly quick computer. It's big brother the A4xx was used by many accountancy firms to calculate accounts do to the fact it could out-pace even a 1.6GHz PC when it came to calculations.

culpepper

patman99 wrote: »

My first computer was a ZX81. Followed by a BBC model B, Dragon 32 (still have), Atari 520ST, Amiga A500, Amiga A1200 (I equiped it with a 15GB HD and a Blizzard 8Mb Ram upgrade), Finally made the leap to PC in 1996 when I purchased a P166-powered desktop. The Amiga was much, much faster than the PC at gaming and video. Also had in the house an Acorn Archimedes A300, now there was a truly quick computer. It's big brother the A4xx was used by many accountancy firms to calculate accounts do to the fact it could out-pace even a 1.6GHz PC when it came to calculations.

We had the Amigas too. They are in our roof space now.
We had the A500 and the A1200,A harddrive ,blizzard upgrade and the speedy 2X (I think) CD drive. I loved it and we learned some blitz basic to program it. It was lovely for graphics work and I believe they used them in the making of films .

The PC won us over as we homeschooled and all the modern software was written for PC. We did use spectrum emulation software though a lot ,for all the educational software that was out there.

There is an emulator for the Archimedese called 'red squirrel' which is very nice to play with.

Ebe_Scrooge

Ah, the good old days ......

When I was at college, we used Amstrad 1512's - all it had was 2 floppy drives. That was all you needed - one disc with Wordstar on, the other disc to save your work to.

Later on, the college invested in the 1640 model - more memory, only one floppy drive, and a built in 10Mb hard disc !! What could anyone possible want with 10 Mb of storage space ???? We kept our entire coursework on 2 or 3 5 1/4" floppies :-)

But yes, I fondly remember the hours of copying code from a magazine into a ZX81, saving to tape, working out what the code actually did so that I could go in and change it to give myself unlimited lives on the amazing game that I'd just coded ....