Welcome to Part 2 of the story of my introduction to computers. Part 1 of this story can be found here.

The ZX80 was launched. This was followed by the ZX81. They were about the size of a mouse mat and used to run with 1K of RAM. Can you imagine trying to run a computer with 1K today. The keyboard was flat with the keys just slightly raised on a touch pad. And you can keep your 3D 32 bit colours graphics. They had monochrome block graphics. A resolution of 24x32 characters or 64x48 block graphics was possible. The games loaded from a cassette tape.

But who cares what they did or didnt have. They were the first home computers. A new era in home entertainment had been started.

But this wasnt enough. People wanted more. Colour. Colour televisions had been around for a while. Do you remember your first colour television? I cant remember exactly when we first got ours. However it was greeting with excitement. We used to fight over who got to watch the colour television, and who got lumbered with the black and white. And there were only 3 channels. BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. Channel 4 wasnt launched until late 1982. How did survive as kids without MTV, the internet or mobile phones? Damned well I think. Todays youth is spoilt. We made do back in the 80s. But we still wanted more. We wanted colour.

A few contenders came along:

• Atari 400/800. I don't actually know much about these two computers. None of my friends had them. In fact don't know anyone who bought one. While I was looking through the old computer magazines such as 'Computer and Video Games Magazine' I did notice lots of adverts and articles for them. For this reason I thought I'd better give them a mention here. (The picture gives a nice optical illusion doesn't it).
   

• The BBC micro. The computer of choice for educational establishments. I used to use these at college. Every break period wed pile into the BBC micro room and play Elite, probably the best game around at the time.

Elite was a space trading game. No, I tell a lie. In my opinion it was the ultimate space trading game. You could take two routes through the game. You could be a law abiding space trader or a pirate. You'd start off with a low ranking harmless status, and move up to become an Elite trader/pilot. Every so often you'd get missions to complete, and god forbid you got an attack of the Thargoids (you should see a doctor about that) in hyperspace. Yes you could cheat at the game, but wheres the challenge in that? It took us a couple of months to complete it.

However it was Sir Clive who took the market by storm again. The Sinclair Spectrum. Probably one of the best selling home computers of all time. Where as the BBC micro was considered to be the rich mans home computer, the Spectrum was more reasonably priced. The poorer mans computer some might say. Still no proper keyboard although it did have rubber keys now. The original model had 16K RAM and colour graphics with a 256x192 resolution. What more could a kid want? 100's of games. That's what!! And the Spectrum certainly had that.

I was falling behind. My friends at school were getting computers (they got BBC micros). What did I have? A ping-pong machine!! I had to do something. I got a Saturday job at a model shop, and started saving.

Click here if you wish to continue reading the story.

All the scans on this page are taken from magazines that no longer exist. A copyright for them may still exist (let me know if you own the copyright) and I will happily acknowledge this as required. None of the pictures have been taken from other websites. If you wish to use them for a project yourselves, please give this website a mention. Thanks for your cooperation..