As we gaze into our beautiful HD screens, and casually access all the world’s information via high speed internet, it is hard to believe just how far we’ve come in a few short years when it comes to computers.
So I thought it would be fun to ask some of the team here at Hotfoot for their memories of their first computers…
Becky Sewell: Our first family machine was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, apparently. My only memories are of playing Lemmings and Doom.
Niall Robertson: Mine was an Acorn Electron. I used it for playing games, but it’s also where I first started learning and playing around with coding.
Stacey Waugh: The first computer I remember in our house was a Commodore 64 – my brother had Terminator 2 Judgement Day and the cassette took an eternity to load… and then often failed! I also remember typing a little story on a computer around the same time – not sure if it was the same computer – and not having any way to save it?!
Charlie Haywood: My first memory of computers was this painful noise of a tape loading games made back in the day. Not that I’d remember…
Jane Devereux: It was a BBC computer, there was a pirate game, can’t remember too much, but it also had a cassette to load, took maybe like 45 mins! Typed in commands like ‘go west’ I think. Oh, and Football Manager!
Aidan Watt: Mine was a Sega Master System, I always wanted a Mega Drive, but we couldn’t stretch to that. It had Alex the Kidd built-in. There’s an emulator here. 8-bit graphics at their best!
Niall: Oh man, that theme music brings back memories!
Ruth Weston: When I was a kid my brother had a Mega Drive that I was only allowed to play on when he was in a good mood… big brother rules! My first ‘proper’ computer was a Power Macintosh G3.Joanna Young: We had a tennis game – I think it was called Pong? We were obsessed with it for years until BBC computers produced Chuckie Egg…
Aidan: Chuckie Egg! I’d forgot about that one!
Charlie: My sister and I had Pong too! Going back to earlier consoles – this Donkey Kong game is one of the first I remember when my mate in the 80s received it for Christmas. He actually found it before Christmas, played it to death, and was bored of it by Christmas Day.
Michael Gibson: Our first sort of computer was a Commodore TV game with Pong and a gun to shoot white moving blobs in about 1982. My first real computer was effectively a dumb terminal running some advertising booking software on MS Dos at my first job in 1988.
So these were ours. Do you remember yours?
