At this time TRS-80s were not cheap in the UK. Apple ][s (which I really wanted) were even more expensive. However, in the UK, the beginning of the 1980s was a bonanza time for UK designed and manufactured micro-computers. The nearest British equivalent to Apple was Acorn and I really wanted an Atom.

By the time I could afford one it had been replaced by the BBC Micro (which was originally to be called the Proton). I ended up getting one of these. At the same time Sinclair came out with the first, really cheap computer, the ZX80. You could either buy it pre-built, or solder it up yourself (which was cheaper). It had 1K of RAM but was expandable. A year later a revised model, the ZX81 (which I believe was sold by Timex in the US), came out with a smaller chip count. It was the first sub 100 GBP computer. Other computers from UK manufacturers were Oric, Dragon, Amstrad, etc. We also had the US imports of C64s and Atari 800s.

An awful lot of engineers in this country were brought up on these machines. They taught a generation to code and there’s a song about this era which takes me back to my childhood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfCdNrRNS4g

I went from the TRS-80 to the BBC B to further ARM powered Acorn machines in the late 80s. Acorn finally ended as a company in the late 90s. I moved on to Linux in the early 90s (whilst still having an Acorn machine). Now I use Macs and Linux. I blogged about my love of Macs recently. My BBC Micro is still going and I recently refurbished it. I now build small electronics projects to connect to it like Ethernet.

Thank you all for your reminiscences. I’m feeling really nostalgic right now.

I have NEVER forgotten the time my toddler, messing around with the Mac Plus, managed to get into the Resource Editor. Dayamn. Fortunately, I got there before anything … interesting happened. Shortly after that, I bought a special desktop program for kids that *only* let them get to their icons.

My mother insisted it had to go into my brother’s room, nominally because he had the room, but there was also that element of “boys like science and computers and stuff”, but my brother was only interested in the baseball game that came with it.

I was the one with the “How to program in BASIC” book in my left hand, typing with my right, copying the programs exactly to see what they did and then making my own incredibly silly little programs, where the computer would ask you what you wanted, and then repeat it.

Not to mention the always popular:

10 Print “You are a dork.”
20 Goto 10

(I was 12. What else do you expect me to do?)

The computer labs in high school gave me Hypercard, Logo, Gopher, Eudora, Mozilla (oh, the original Mozilla!), and, above all else, those rickety ancient VAX terminals with telnet connections to MUDs around the world. That brought me into the Internet, which brought me into everything.

But it all goes back to that Tandy attached to the TV, fingers cramping slightly as I hold open the book, peering at the code and carefully, slowly, delightedly picking out code.

Mama does not really have an aptitude for computers. My first adventure in documentation was evidently (I can no longer remember this, but Dad brought it up) writing a tutorial on how to change the time on the stereo clock, because I could make sense of the manual and she couldn’t. (Dad says that Mama still brings it out twice a year to change the clock.)

The first computer I had some attachment to was our Windows 3.1 computer. I messed around with Paint and learned Solitaire and whatever, but the big thing was Myst. I’d never played video games before, so this was really my first experience with immersive, interactive storytelling and sophisticated computer graphics. The other major component was the internet. I was living in a really rural place at the time, and to connect anywhere in the world was quite something. (But the computer couldn’t handle Java applets. Still a little bitter at my dad for not waiting a few more months until Windows 95 came out.)

Eventually we got a Windows 98 computer and I could finally play Riven! And I began to explore Myst/Riven fandom some more, intrigued most of all by people who’d put together fan-made worlds in website form for everyone to explore. This led to me eventually discovering and learning Blender, and also learning about HTML and website creation. I suppose it’s kind of a strange “geek success story” that I became a programmer rather than a digital artist of some sort, but in any case I definitely credit fandom and computer graphics with changing the way I think about computers, as a tool and a medium rather than just a source of passive entertainment.

Our first computer at home was a Packard Bell 436 running Win3.1 and DOS, so there were those (and we had Prodigy for a time, and AOL, way back). At the same time, the father of my then-best friend is a surgeon, and he would get to bring home the latest Macs from his hospital. So I've got a weird POV, having both watched my father play hours of Duke Nukem and playing my own hours of the early Cyan Hypercard games with my friend. (There needs to be an old-school Mac emulator for today's Macs, because I WANT TO PLAY COSMIC OSMO.)

I also remember the BASIC programs that were published in the back of 321-Contact magazine, which we had a subscription to for years. Sometimes when I had the patience, I would work with them, but they always seemed so terribly long...at the risk of outing myself, I still don't code much at all outside of web stuff, just greatly admire those who do.