Duncan's Computer Age:

I think it was 1981 I encountered my first computer, prices back then being astronomical, the only option to get a computer at an affordable price was to buy a kit-build machine. Two such machines were available back then that fitted the price requirement; the Acorn Atom, and the Sinclair ZX80. Though cheaper, the ZX80 I considered to be a pile of junk; a closed architecture machine that was likely to go nowhere. The Atom on the other hand was designed to be expandable, the operating system was well documented, and on the whole it looked a much better bet. I wasn't disappointed (except by the delivery time, which was measured in months) the Atom was a brilliant little machine, and got me thoroughly hooked on computers.

Next came an Apple II - Well, an ITT 2020 / Apple IIe compatible; it even bore the apple logo, but the case was slate grey rather than beige. I found the OS on the Apple II infuriating, and the machine as a whole, pretty frustrating. Apple were rather more closed about their design than Acorn (who even shipped circuit diagrams and schematics with their machine), because of this, documentation was more scarce, and programming the machine consequently more awkward. For the most part, found myself using the Atom when I wanted to play.

Having enjoyed a phenomenal success with the Atom, Acorn followed it up with the Proton (I think that's what is was initially called). Somehow the machine got taken under the wing of Auntie Beeb, and became the BBC Microcomputer. I've still got my Beeb, as the years have gone on, I've kept an eye out for second hand Beeb Bargains - my machine now lives in a Viglen PC type case (with the original BBC keyboard re-cased on the end of a coiled wire). Within the main case, along with the main BBC motherboard and PSU goes a 5 1/4" floppy disk drive, an additional 32K of 'Sideways' ram, a 6502 Co-Processor with its own 64K of ram and PSU, and the Acorn speech chip (it speaks fluent Kenneth Kendall). Every so often I fire it up for a game of Elite, sometimes I just switch it on to hear the start up beep's.

The Commodore Amiga - Now there's a clever little computer. America seems to have adopted it a little more, but here in Britain, non-Amiga owners considered it nothing but a games machine. This is a real shame as with a little more commercial success, future generations of the Amiga could have been very serious machines indeed. I was doing stuff on my Amiga that the average PC back then could only dream of, and I think with the research that would have followed if it had sold into the business market, the Amiga could have shaken the Mac's Graphic/Design stronghold.

Somewhere in this time period, I managed to make it through a pile of Exams; I left with 8 'O' Levels and 3 'A' Levels, and pretty sick of education on the whole. I decided that the only way to get my hands on more computing power was to get a job - TSB Trust Company were running Andover at the time, and they had a pretty big computer centre, so I applied to them.