Happy 30th Birthday, ZX Spectrum!

[James]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17776666

The first computer I owned with it's awesome 48K memory is also the one I learned to program on first using the crazy code input method mentioned in the article.

It really was an incredible machine. I was just a kid but was coding commercial-quality games with my mates who were also just schoolkids. Even my dad who was mid-late 60's at the time learned to program on it, which I just found incredible. Without a doubt this was one of the machines that started the UK IT industry.

Anyone else have one?

[JeeBee]

I had an Amstrad CPC 464 back in the day. Missed out on the Spectrum apart from an early Spectrum emulator I ran on my Amiga 1200 which I used to play Scuba Dive and Quazatron (you had to make the most of the games that came on the discs from the PD library - no internet for most people back then!).

[James]

I remember those, especially Quazatron which was a great game. The gaming industry really kicked off then with some of the current greats all involved from the start, like Rare (Ultimate: Play the Game).

Funnily enough I actually missed what I consider to be the best game on the platform - Mike Singleton's Doomdark's Revenge (he was a teacher who quit to become a full time coder). I first played it on an emulator on my 486 DX, and it was still better than any PC game at the time. Great times.

[rarson]

Not sure if any of you guys have seen this before, but it's about the story of Sinclair and Acorn and the creation of the BBC Micro. It's BBC-style made-for-TV movie, so I'm sure it's over-dramatized and the truth has been stretched quite a bit in typical BBC fashion, but it's entertaining nonetheless.

My first PC was a Commodore 64. Not that I'm that old, mind you, because my parents were too cheap to buy one of the brand new Pentiums (or even one of the 486s that were still populating store shelves at the time). The ironic thing is, the whole reason they bought us a C64 was because they didn't want us using a PC to play games. The used C64 they bought us came with about 150 of them and that's basically all we could do with it (I taught myself a bit of BASIC though).

[dan]

I had a ZX81 as my first machine, and man that thing was a chore to program. But it got me hooked. After that my parents were kind enough to buy me a Commodore Plus4, which was basically a C16 but with more memory and built-in business applications. I missed out on the whole Speccy thing, although lots of mates had them.

-dan