4 ms·

Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew. Aged 11, going through the ring-bound orange manual just after Christmas, because the cassette-player w

Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew. Aged 11, going through the ring-bound orange manual just after Christmas, because the cassette-player we had was broken. When a replacement was obtained in the new-year I started playing games with my sisters, but I'd already been "forced" to play with BASIC and I never really stopped..

ErroneousBosh 3mo ago
> Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew. Dundee? :-D There's a theory made popular by Chris van der Kuyl (his dad Tony owned an Apple II, the first home computer I ever used - I played the Lemonade Stand game on it in his kitchen) that the reason Dundee is that everyone had a ZX Spectrum and so anyone with any talent got good at programming them. And why did everyone have a ZX Spectrum in Dundee? Because they were made in the Timex factory just off the Kingsway (the building is still there, it's a furniture factory now), and everyone's dad knew someone who could "get" a Spectrum for them, bypassing the usual supply chain hassle. The Planet Bar in Lochee probably shifted more units than John Menzies ever did.
- stevekemp 3mo ago
  I grew up in Yorkshire, though I'm half-Scottish there's no link to Dundee! But the Spectrums were the best-selling UK machine at the time, so I'm sure there were lots of regions where they were super-common. I think I had a friend with a BBC Micro, but I can't recall anybody else having something different. (There was a bit of console-split later, between NES and Sega Megadrive, and later still between Atari/Amiga, before we all settled for big grey boxed PCs.)
  - ErroneousBosh 3mo ago
    > and later still between Atari/Amiga, before we all settled for big grey boxed PCs. I wish the Archimedes had won. It kind of did, I guess, damn near everything runs ARM, but we lost RiscOS on the way.

ErroneousBosh 3mo ago

> Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew. Dundee? :-D There's a theory made popular by Chris van der Kuyl (his dad Tony owned an Apple II, the first home computer I ever used - I played the Lemonade Stand game on it in his kitchen) that the reason Dundee is that everyone had a ZX Spectrum and so anyone with any talent got good at programming them. And why did everyone have a ZX Spectrum in Dundee? Because they were made in the Timex factory just off the Kingsway (the building is still there, it's a furniture factory now), and everyone's dad knew someone who could "get" a Spectrum for them, bypassing the usual supply chain hassle. The Planet Bar in Lochee probably shifted more units than John Menzies ever did.

stevekemp 3mo ago
I grew up in Yorkshire, though I'm half-Scottish there's no link to Dundee! But the Spectrums were the best-selling UK machine at the time, so I'm sure there were lots of regions where they were super-common. I think I had a friend with a BBC Micro, but I can't recall anybody else having something different. (There was a bit of console-split later, between NES and Sega Megadrive, and later still between Atari/Amiga, before we all settled for big grey boxed PCs.)
- ErroneousBosh 3mo ago
  > and later still between Atari/Amiga, before we all settled for big grey boxed PCs. I wish the Archimedes had won. It kind of did, I guess, damn near everything runs ARM, but we lost RiscOS on the way.