My first computer was a Spectrum 48k. My school bought a ZX81 and a logo turtle - one for the whole school. We went down as a class and got to play with it a gr

My first computer was a Spectrum 48k. My school bought a ZX81 and a logo turtle - one for the whole school. We went down as a class and got to play with it a group, calling out instructions that the teacher would type in. Other kids seemed to get bored with it quickly, but I was hooked. At home, I went on and on about this to my parents. My mother had done punch card work in University so recognized how big of a leap it was to be able to have a computer in the house. A few days later they announced that we would get one. This was in Asia, and the Spectrum 48k had just been released there. Games rarely made it all that way, but the magazines did, so I spent hours upon hours typing code in, bug fixing, modifying things here and there. Save it to cassette tape. I still have dreams where the sound of software loading from cassette appears - kind of like the sound a modem makes connecting, but longer and somehow softer. Every few years we'd go on holiday to the UK and I'd save up my pocket money to buy as many games on cassette as I could. Then I'd spend the rest of my holiday reading and re-reading the inserts, trying to imagine what the game would be like when I finally get it home. Titles like Ghostbusters, Dungeon master, The Hobbit, Zzoom, Chess, Horace and the spiders, there was even a 3d maze with skulls and jewels. It wasn't all good through - I waited weeks to play Cookie only to get home and find the cassette didn't load properly! But the most time I spent was trying to write my own games in Basic. It was amazing - a machine with everything you needed right there, a language, colours, sounds, all built in, ready for a young mind to explore. The keyboard even had the keywords and colours printed on each key and the editor knew when to expect a keyword rather than a letter. The whole of Basic was right there in front of me to explore without having to read through thick manuals. After a while the 128k came out, and the new games no longer worked on my lowly 48k machine, and as my cassette tapes started to wear out or worse (where I lived there was one particular insect that liked to make little clay nests in cassette tapes...). Soon I was a teen and more interested in meatspace than the gaming world, but that early programming experience informed so much of my life and career. Fond memories. Thank you, Sinclair, for opening up a whole world to me.