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 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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 16 hours ago | parent [-]

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 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.