It was back in 1977 when I had my first go on a computer. This was at school when we had access for 1 hour, 2 evenings a week on a terminal linked via modem to a mainframe in Hull. Quite a change from today, with no video display but just a keyboard for company. Had great fun playing Star Trek and Lunar Lander as well as learning the BASIC computer language.
Things got a little better at University in 1979, still no graphics but you could occasionally get a terminal with a video screen and plenty of time on the mainframe. I just missed the punched card age thankfully - though those doing computer courses were forced to use them. Also learned FORTRAN.
Then in 1980 my brother bought a ZX81 - what a change this made. Taught myself machine code and was amazed what you could do with 1k of memory.
In 1981 I was drooling over Commodore Pet's - very nearly bought one but the ~£700 price tag did make me think for a long time. Quite a sum when on a student grant. Glad I held on because then 1982 I obtained one of the first Sinclair Spectrums for a 21st birthday present. Waited all summer for it to arrive - remember well Clive Sinclair's poor marketing. It eventually arrived the week after I had returned to University, what timing!
This was certainly a revelation, the games were fun but of little interest to me. Though I was popular with my landlady's kids as I could break most games to give infinite life etc., probably a good little earner for them. I was hoping to use the Spectrum to write my PhD thesis on, and even wrote a fully working machine code word processor to do so. Unfortunately I had bad experiences with the microdrive, having returned mine to the shop several times as a tape chewer. Looked around for standard 5 1/2" drives which could be used and tried 3 in all - all gave problems and were returned as unreliable so finally gave up and bought a Commodore 64 and disk drive.
The Commodore 64 has probably the slowest disk drive in the world, but it did work so with the Easyscript software which came bundled with it and an extremely loud daisywheel printer I was away. I also bought an MPS801 dot matrix printer which although noisy didn't shake my desk around so much.
I survived with the Commodore 64 until 1994 when I bought a Colani Highscreen 486DX2 with a whopping 8MB memory. So farewell to the classic computers and on to PC's which although quite powerful just don't seem to be as much fun.