[mamaniscalco]

Steve, just brilliant! Like a lot of others will surely say, thanks for taking us all back for a brief moment. Your post has inspired me to write a similar one on my own site.

It would be pretty cool if there were a website dedicated to the tales of how individual developers got their own start and the memories that they have of how magical it all seemed way back when. I bet there would be a lot of overlap in the stories regardless of the era.

[stevekemp]

I'm sure you're right about overlap; I know that the Spectrum was probably the best-selling machine in the UK at the time, so there must be thousands of people who starting programming as a direct result of owning one.

There are whole scenes I'm utterly unaware of, like the Atari vs Amiga thing that I remember reading about at the time but paid no attention to. I'll pretend those users were more at home with the PC!

[mamaniscalco]

Actually I started on an Atari 400 and then eventually an Amiga 1000. Perhaps that's more common here in the states?