[tzot]

Commodore 64 was quite popular in Europe too, but I believe more successful was the Sinclair Spectrum (and some copycats behind the iron curtain). In my case, too, it was the Speccy and later the Sinclair QL, when it got really affordable; I owe my life to the QL :)

[exitb]

And in eastern Europe, due to economical reasons, its popularity extended well into the 90s. There's a whole group of people that grew up with the Commodore that are a decade younger than their western peers.

[killerstorm]

Yep. My father build a ZX Spectrum clone for me somewhere around 1991. Few years later he also got Commodore 64 as a gift from German engineers he was working with.

I think both of these machines are really good for learning BASIC: much fewer distractions, you type commands and computer does something.

[nobodyandproud]

Still counts! Poor, eager, young, and a bit geeky: C64 was made for those that fell into this category.

[stevekemp]

Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.

Aged 11, going through the ring-bound orange manual just after Christmas, because the cassette-player we had was broken. When a replacement was obtained in the new-year I started playing games with my sisters, but I'd already been "forced" to play with BASIC and I never really stopped..

[ErroneousBosh]

> Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.

Dundee? :-D

There's a theory made popular by Chris van der Kuyl (his dad Tony owned an Apple II, the first home computer I ever used - I played the Lemonade Stand game on it in his kitchen) that the reason Dundee is that everyone had a ZX Spectrum and so anyone with any talent got good at programming them.

And why did everyone have a ZX Spectrum in Dundee? Because they were made in the Timex factory just off the Kingsway (the building is still there, it's a furniture factory now), and everyone's dad knew someone who could "get" a Spectrum for them, bypassing the usual supply chain hassle.

The Planet Bar in Lochee probably shifted more units than John Menzies ever did.

[stevekemp]

I grew up in Yorkshire, though I'm half-Scottish there's no link to Dundee!

But the Spectrums were the best-selling UK machine at the time, so I'm sure there were lots of regions where they were super-common.

I think I had a friend with a BBC Micro, but I can't recall anybody else having something different.

(There was a bit of console-split later, between NES and Sega Megadrive, and later still between Atari/Amiga, before we all settled for big grey boxed PCs.)

[ErroneousBosh]

> and later still between Atari/Amiga, before we all settled for big grey boxed PCs.

I wish the Archimedes had won. It kind of did, I guess, damn near everything runs ARM, but we lost RiscOS on the way.

[dcminter]

Speccy guy back in the day here, but these days I love Linux, and you know Linus cut his teeth on the QL, right?

I feel like storage has improved slightly since microdrives were state of the art too...