By 1982 the whole home computer thing had just gone crazy.  Everybody seemed to have a home computer.  But something very quickly became obvious - you were either somebody that frittered away money on new games (on cassette) and just played them; or you were the kind of person that wanted to know more, learn more, and do more.

I was the latter type, as were a few of my close friends.  We spent a lot of time going to computer club at school, and hanging around computer displays in stores seeing what we could do in 5 minutes flat! 

Unfortunately it took a little while for me to get a machine of my own.  My Uncle Eric kindly donated me his old Sinclair ZX80, which was just to boost I needed.  I started to learn the basics of programming.  But I found the 1K RAM woefully inadequate.  And the fact you couldn’t even address the display was infuriating.  It took me just a matter of weeks to become frustrated.

My Dad realized this was driving me up the wall, and after a little pooling of pocket money, birthday money, and some cash my Nana left me, I finally sprang for an Oric-1 in 1983.  For those that were around at the time, you may scoff.  The Oric was known as the direct competitor to the Sinclair Spectrum, which had been released a year earlier.  The rivalry was fierce.  But I had a great time.  My first proper home computer had full color graphics, loads of RAM, decent audio, and a proper keyboard.  The Spectrum to me was just a cheap toy.  A year and a half later, I upgraded it to the Atmos, which had a supreme keyboard.

From 1983 to 1985, I had a fabulous time - I learnt to program, understood the basics of graphics, wrote a whole stack of games for myself, and started sending my games to companies to see if they were interested in publishing them.  Then the market imploded...