I was kinda lucky to have access to allot of computers as my father ran a business and after hours i got access to his computers at his premises, and used allot of early stuff, as he seemed to buy computers just on the basis that he liked a particular model and indulged in it as an investment whether you actually got value out of the machines was less of interest in those days, in those it was all so new people bought them just for the excitement of exploring what they could do, its a long list but here goes with some of my favourites :

The first computer I laid hands on ? was the Apple II with single external 5.25″ disk II floppy drive with green screen monitor no colour.

I played space invaders on it which was a mean and almost perfect conversion from the arcade, and tried out all the various software. Of which there were some pretty funky demos including one with an interactive room, which was pretty cool , that could have been an early hypercard demo maybe ? I dont think it was “mystery house” as it was more bitmap graphics than vectors, a picture that winked at you, things in the room that did things, but certainly cant find any reference to it on the web. Perhaps a little too early at that stage although i didnt know what software was used to build that room demo. Although I did think it was highly original at the time and not many other computers had done anything like it.

After that, I got my hands on the first portable computer the Osborne 1 Luggable :

for those days the size of a family suitcase was considered portable, it didnt have allot of software but it had cpm and came with mbasic which you could then then run collosal cave adventure from, man I got a kick out of that game late night with that little vector green screen, i can never explain what a revelation is was to play that game, xyzzy, plugh are the magic words dont forget to get the lamp, the egg the bird, the cage the rusty wand, the pirate the maze it was all fantastic. you painted the pictures in your own imagination, a cup of coffee and few custard creams and I was off on an adventure for hours.

After those two memorable and seminal machines there were many others, Apricot xen, viglens, almarcs, sirius’s, pdp11′s, husky portables, IBM’s, I remember using the GEM operating system which was my first experience of a gui and using gempaint, to paint my first artisitic pictures on a computer, all simple blue and black sillhouettes with moonlight, if i’d have left school at the tender age of 11 I would have been an early ZX81 game developer, probably no smarter move could have been made.

My father also was probably the first man in hampshire to buy an original apple laserwriter 1, I remember switching toner cartridges for metallic effect ones etc, interesting stuff.

Also the first I’d heard off to have a Hi-res Hercules graphics card(720×348 in 1bit)

with the first version of ventura publisher:

and a winchester drive 30mb in size ? I think it was called a winchester because it was the equivalent of two of the biggest drives at the time and was therefore double, like a double barrel winchester rifle, although maybe i’ve misunderstood this. A few duller ones too the amstrad PC1512 pc clones struck me as particularly meagre ham fisted machines, compared to their genius CPC brethren, Though the PCW’s were probably the most purchased and functionally used business machines of those times to enhance productivity in actual businesses in the UK.

a computer of my own (well to share with my brother :] )

Upto this point id been using the machines in my dads business rather than having my own machine, at about the age of 12, the parents clubbed together a feat considering they broke up before I was 1 way back when. And at considerable expense bought me and my brother a ZX81 to share for christmas.

with cassette tapecorder and ran it off an old B/W television. We laboriously typed in games from listings in magazines and loaded a few cassette games into it, only having 1k of Ram meant you had to be totally ingenious to write games for it, as in the 1K of ram you could probably get 10 long lines of code before the memory ran out, none the less I learned to write in basic on that machine, and to be honest never have I seen a more suitable machine for anyone to learn basic coding on, switch on and away you go no distractions or anything. there wasnt much else to do on computers then except to code, whereas today less people learn to code because computers have so much else you can do. Never bought the ram expansion for it the machine even at £99.00 was only just affordable by familys in those days, hacking hardware to make the most of it existed even then, for instance one of them frigged sound on a machine with no sound, by making you turn the volume on the televison to maximum, they worked out how you could modulate the inteference noise sent to the television from the natural hum of the internal circuitry to create an actual tune without a sound chip anywhere in the machine !

games on the ZX81 :
a 3D maze game on the ZX81 the grandaddy of 1st person shooters :

The precursor of elite > “trader” a 16k game i could only dream of :

The keyboard was as understood a legendary pain to use, but hey Sinclair did make computers personal and affordable, without him there would be no personal computer industry, and to think we once had a silicon valley in the UK, and now we have nought, quite sad really.

they even managed to hack high res graphics onto a ZX81, so the 16k games looked more like spectrum games.

My next machine was a total revelation the only good thing Alan Michael Sugar ever produced in my opinion (unless you consider crass entertainment like the apprentice, interesting), the cpc series is what I will only ever remember him for, as specification wise it was a stroke of genius, the best machine his company ever made the Amstrad CPC6128 :

This machine was like moving into modern day computing in comparison to the ZX81, amazing colour amazing sound, a disk drive, the machine was far superior to its nearest competition, but the machine was expensive, I knew I was very lucking getting one. It had an amazing paint program OCP art studio, the games were amazing it had many graphics modes one even running in 640×200 with 2 colours ? would have been considered hi-def by those days standards, the quality of the games was amazing, later platforms did not have such good games it must have been quite good to program games on, Gauntlett was amazingly close to the arcade version, Zombie by UBI-soft amazing (Amazing intro screen and music blew me away).

Cauldron had fantastic music and was a great if tough game :

As you can see by the following video almost every game genre played today in just an uprated form, was well established on this platform at that time, apart from god sims(actually even little computer person could be considered the precursor of the sims).

Even 3d games such as doom were represented by maze games and elite etc. As a gaming and basic learning computer it had it all.

I also played my first mmo on this computer via my first modem circa 1986-1988 ! 23 years ago ! I think it was 300baud and you used connect to micronet
which was run by prestel part created on post office premises and run by BT which i think was a BBS a bulletin board system, and from that you could telnet ? to “shades” mud

this was a truly stunning experience for the day, so few had been online at that time let alone played in an online game ! it was basically a Multi user text based adventure game where you could see other peoples action and chat. And was the first time I saw online griefing from a character ?(so long ago its almost madness) Each character had a name, and there was this one user who was called Reepicheep aka that mouse from narnia, anyway he used to find a place where people were congregating to go into a castle etc and he used to make allot of futile chat and fill the screen with rubbish, in this game you could kick another character and it would show that action to other users, so everyone took turn to give Reepicheep a liitle kick so the screen instead was full “xxxxx kicks Reepicheep hard” etc to stop him from blathering and filling screens with useless text, eventually he got the message, I got the feeling he was just to excited at being in an online game.

believe or not some genius has ressurected this game in java form presumably no extra players though ?

you can play Shades here

I also had access to an atari 800xl with 1050 disk drive, which i still have lots of disks for:

atari 800xl

at around this point though it wasnt my own machine, my fathers favourite game on this machine was “Journey to the planets”