I was twelve when I got mine. We first had a 16k spectrum on loan from the primary school where my mom was a teacher -- together with a hefty course in Informat

I was twelve when I got mine. We first had a 16k spectrum on loan from the primary school where my mom was a teacher -- together with a hefty course in Informatics from the Dutch LOI training school. When the little chap had to go after a month, because another teacher needed training, I was inconsolable. Shortly after, we got a _48_k spectrum, because I already had showed I could code up stuff on the 16k one. I had to work for it, though! I had to raise my score for English from 3/10 to at least 7/10, or no speccy. Fortunately, all sinclair magazines were in English, so by Easter I had scored 10/10! And after that... I coded, I gamed, I read books, bought extra programming languages, coded, gamed -- and by the end of my high school career, its keyboard had died. The empty shell hangs from a picture hook in my study, to remind me of where I came from, and also, because I have always loved its gorgeous design. (Weird to think that the speccy sold 5 million units or so... Which is about the number of people using my open source application Krita every month, too.)