I remember a friend of mine had a Spectrum ZX81... yeah totally with you on those keys!!
My first encounter with a "real" home computer was when I visited a friend and he proudly demonstrated his new ZX81 & 16K memory pack on a decrepit old black and white television with cm wide scanlines!
While I wasn't too impressed with either the visuals or the "sound" (we had an Intellivision that had surprisingly good sound chip for that time and had it hooked up to a good quality colour telly), the fact that you could actually program your own games was an eye-opener! At school we were introduced to simple programming on Commodore Pets (green screen anyone?).
A year later, in 1983 our parents got us a C64 with two games: Wheelin' Wally and Forbidden Forest. All the neighbourhood kids got together to hack Forbidden Forest, and most of us had C64s at home - so you can imagine our delight when we actually hacked the game and shared copies of it.
It came out on the sixty four but from what I remember it was a dud. Totally unplayable because it was so slow. A shame really. That's if my memory is correct.
The C64 version was flickery as heck. Quite poor indeed. But look at this:
There's a healthy community of retro programmers for all major 8-bitters: new games are released, old games improved, and even game engines/frameworks are now available to develop new games without the need for assembly or C knowledge. It's pretty cool.
I have a vague memory of taking my electron in my bag on a couple of occasions to use that instead.
My dad and I visited a friend of his, and that guy had a brand new Acorn Electron unpacked box standing on his kitchen table. I was there for the unpacking, and since then I have really liked its design. It looks just quite cool.
I never got an Electron, though. Instead, with the C64 being used by my brother, I received an Amstrad CPC 664 for my birthday. I really liked the Amstrad. Unfortunately, I was the only kid with an Amstrad CPC machine in a 100km radius. I played Elite to death on it: that conversion was solid.
But I've been looking into getting an Acorn Electron on eBay. No space for it though... ;-)
Then the Amiga happened. All the cool kids in our neighbourhood (yeah, this was an up-town suburb) got an Amiga 1000, and our parents (bless their souls) were also convinced by us that "it would help with school work". That machine just absolutely blew our minds. I still have it tucked under my desk. Great memories: swapping and demo parties, pretending to be press to get into the London games trade show, being part of a demo/hacker group, and befriending guys and girls who'd later would work on some of the bigger games on console and PC, developing games with friends, creating 3D anims with a hacked version of LW, and so on. Did my first paid-for print and game design work on it. Awesome time.
We moved to 2 Amiga 500s, then an A1200 with loads of hardware expansions, and then it all...
ended.
The boring old PC and Mac took over.
But not quite. I've always been part of the retro gaming scene, and currently that scene is flourishing, and I've actually started playing with Z80 assembly code and a bunch of game dev engines for 8bit. It's great fun.
And last year I got my hands on an Elan Enterprise 8bit machine - new in box from a forgotten storage depot in Egypt! A really obscure and rare 8-bit machine.
I saw this machine in a consumer electronics store back when it was introduced on the market in 1986 - too late to be able to compete and it flunked, but I LOVED the design of it. I was mesmerized and the specs were impressive for an 8-bit machine. Only was in there for a few minutes, yet the design made such an impression on me that when I saw these new-in-box being sold on eBay, I took a chance, and got one for $100.
Basic comes on a separate cartridge that is plugged in on the left. Like the Commodore Plus/4 it has a built-in primitive word/text processing software.
Still have to hook it up to a monitor - ordered a special cable in Spain, and it arrived, but I need a tv or monitor with a scart connection - which I do not have. Still looking around for something. Would be nice to develop a simple game for it. But at this point I don't even know if it still works!
Played it to death on the CPC, on the Amiga, and on PC (Elite clone remake).
I do have Elite: Dangerous on Steam, but just no time to play it properly... Looks great, though.
