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Being a 50's child there were no computers to speak of, and certainly no 'home' computers. Even going through college, computers demanded entire rooms, lots of cooling and generally had teletypes as input/output devices, it wasn't until the late 70's that any thoughts of actually owning a computer to use at home were even suggested.
My first 'computer' was the Science of Cambridge MK14 bought in 1977, running the SC/MP microprocessor, you had to code the assembler mnemonics to HEX yourself and enter these into a HEX keypad, it had a 8 digit 7 segment display and a massive 256 bytes of RAM! This was followed in 1979 by a Compukit UK101, proper keyboard, 4k RAM and a connection to use a TV as a display. Mine I built from a kit. This was one of my early favourites and I went on to design a number of add-on PCB's for it, including a backplane, RAM board, ROM board and a High Speed Cassette Interface, and it was heavily modified. Next came the big one, in 1981 I bought the BBC Model B, fairly expensive in comparison to others of the time like the ZX Spectrum, Commodore, etc. but it had excellent build quality and finally colour! I added all sorts of extras to it, ROM boards, RAM expansions, Floppy Disk drives 5¼ inch, again expensive for the time. Favourite software: Elite And finally, before PC's took over the world in 1988 I bought an Atari 1040STFM and built up a massive collection of software, my favourite software for this has to be Dungeon Master. |
MK14
UK101
BBC Model B
Atari STFM
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