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My friends all got ZX Spectrums and had a larger pool of people to swap games with. My parents got me an Acorn Electron, which has a child i was disappointed.
by sshagent 6y ago
My friends all got ZX Spectrums and had a larger pool of people to swap games with.
My parents got me an Acorn Electron, which has a child i was disappointed. I loved the hell out of that thing and the lack of friends with the same system, meant i learn basic and things spiraled from there. So in a way, something i thought as a mistake turned out to be perfect.
- stevekemp 6y agoI started reading the manual of our ZX Spectrum because when the kit arrived the tape-deck didn't work. We had a bunch of free games with the computer, but we couldn't load any of them! No doubt I'd have gotten around to it eventually anyway, but that was the direct source of my programming career: https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html
- pm215 6y agoMmm, our first computer was a TI99/4A, which my Dad picked up cheap when they were on sale as part of TI getting out of the home-computer business in the early 80s. Having very few commercial games for it was part of what nudged me into trying typing in games programs from books and user group magazines, which acted as a pretty good gradual introduction to programming as I had to figure out why things weren't working or try to adapt programs written for other BASIC dialects.