My first contact with a computer was an Apple II we had at school in about 1983/4. I didn't get to use it but I saw it working and eventually got to play chess on it (badly) when I was about 8 or 9.
At 10 I took a programming course in BASIC along with my older brothers and in about 1985/86 we got our first home PC. A PC clone with 4.7MHz CPU, one floppy drive and 256Kb of RAM. It was a great machine and I even practised my math tables on it in grade 4. Played hours of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight Starflight on this machine. In summer it used to overheat and freeze!
In about 1990 we upgraded to a machine with similar specs but 640K of RAM, 5.25inch floppy and 3.5-inch floppy drive. Played a lot of Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest on these machines.
My very first home encounter with computers was with an early Commodore and ZX81 my brothers' friends would bring over. I adored the ZX81 since. I love the idea of it and the beautiful industrial design.
These days I own a ZX80 built from a replica kit, 2 x ZX81s (one says 1980 on the board and the other is much newer). Right now I'm saving to have my two Spectrums sent away for professional refurbishing. One is displaying garbage on the screen (Issue 2 board). The other one works except for interference on the screen.
I'll send them to bytedelight.com.
So there it is.
Albertus
Standby alert