I can't remember the name of the first one my dad bought. Guess it would have been around 1981 or 82, when I was 8 or 9 years old. The company went bust the week after he bought it. It was called something like a "newline" or "newbook". I never met anyone else who owned one or had heard of it. We didn't have any games for it but I loved learning BASIC and keeping my little sister endlessly amused with "Guess the number I'm thinking of" games. (I used to put in some random quotes when she got it wrong, like "Higher, you nitwit" and "Lower, smelly-bum"!)

When I was about 11, we got a Dragon 32 with a whole 8 colours. I had endless fun relearning all the BASIC syntax and teaching it to beep in different tones. I think we owned two games for it: Pong (of course) and a text-based adventure game called "Haunted House" or similar. My dad and I programmed a very complicated routine to work out league standings in our regional sailing championships. We used to take the machine to sailing meets and set it all up for the day, enter all the race results in and let it work out the points, then break it down at the end of the day again. Since it had basically no storage and the audio tape system was dire, I would have to re-enter all the data from the previous week's printouts.

Then a couple of years later, we got a Amstrad CPC 664. This was the same as the 464 except it had a built-in floppy drive instead of a tape drive. Wow! now we could enhance our routine for league standing and effectively make it a database. Now that we could collect and store names and address, we even wrote a mailmerge function! I was known as "Karen, the Computer Girl" and I had the supreme power, LOL

The Amstrad had some good games for it, the Roland series being a particular favourite. We used to get "Amstrad User" magazine every month (fortnight?), which frequently included code for games... so whereas today you would get a cover disk, they would print like half a million lines of hex code which you could enter into your machine and end up with a fairly crappy and basic game. That is, after you'd gone back through the code 48 times trying to figure out where you'd transposed "C24DR3" for "C42DR3"...

Happy days... :biggrin:

Then BASIC went out, and I couldn't be bothered to learn a "real" programming language, plus I was starting to get interested in lusting after cuties instead, so that was the end of my involvement with computers for a decade or so!

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"you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love." - Warsan Shire