And talking of games ; the spectrum had REAL games , not multimedia multimillion multi-everything fatware. I mean , when you are limited to 48k of ram you have to concentrate on the playability of a game . The graphics were so-so , and sound had to be generated by the CPU itself , but some of the best games to date were created on the spectrum. Does the name Manic Miner ring a bell ? Or its sequel , Jet Set Willy ? Well , those are two classic games that STILL have more to offer than most modern "no brain no pain" games. Anyway , we have a spectrum home page on the web server ; click here to check it out.
My second computer came much later ; I was a physics student at UNIT by the time my friend and I pooled our money and bought a used Amiga 500. This machine soon became my prime interest ; by summer we had bought a harddisk controller for it , extra ram (a whopping 3M total - quite a lot for an amiga) 140M harddisk , and a mountain of floppy disks. A couple of years ago I moved the machine into the university , and hooked it up to the local terminal server for a direct access to the internet - SANS PHONEBILL :-). The new connectivity soon fed my taste for hardware though , and I was discovering that a 7MHz 68000 cpu with 3M ram isn't really much good at stuff like raytracing and image processing. When I saw a friend of mine announce that he was going to sell his amiga (with accellerator card and ram) I thought `What the heck.. it's only money' and bought it . A few weeks later (it takes ages to transfer money across the atlantic) it was delivered on my door , and I promptly brought it to the university , dug up an old multisync monitor and plugged it in. I don't think I've turned the computer off for more than a few hours at a time since I received it :)
To summarize why I like the amiga , and prefer it over faster machines like MAC and IbmPC (or Macinthrash and PeeSee) ;