Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

[R-Tape]

Ooh, have you written a lottery predictor too?

(I might actually try this sometime!)

[Morkin]

Heh. Nice thread. I'm another one of the 'early deserters' I'm afraid, I think I'd pretty much ditched my Speccy by the end of the 80s

In the early 90s I was drawn to the cool-looking graphics of the Amiga. Never kept my Speccy, mainly due to a number of flat moves and the need to keep possessions at a minimum.

Fairly swiftly moved from Amiga, to PS1, then to PS2. Was quite late to getting myself a PC, was probably past 2000 before I had one of my own.

Got interested in the Speccy scene again around 2007 I think. After all, everyone comes back - eventually..

[R-Tape]

I missed a few replies here. This is a great thread. The reason may be obvious, but not to me: our 8 & 16bit stuff has a personality we want to preserve, but - and I may be proved wrong - we'll never care about our old nokia or sun microsystem in the same way. Why?!

In my case there was no Amiga or Atari ST period. I switched from Zx Spectrum directly to PC.

Why did it happen that way? Interesting, and pretty rare in the UK - is yours a representative example of the "Slavic" experience?

And here I am now, getting my first grey hairs. Maybe less passionate about Speccy, maybe a bit more bitter about the people but still caring about our old machine

Amen brother (though I'm balding more than greying )

Nobody at that time cared about PCs, we were all gamers, PCs were for boring word processing, spreadsheets and business propositions.

Aye - looking back now, I got a PC around 2000 specifically for word and spreadsheets. I'd forgotten about gaming and did actually want it for my "homework". The trouble is - I didn't actually have much "homework" to do!

(and prodge - how many power surges?!!! did you live via a wonky wire in a forest?!!)

And when I got ZX32 by V. Kapartzianis

Gerton Lunter

These names are new to me. Are they still active in the scene?

When I win the lottery (which will almost certainly be tonight) and buy a massive house, I'll have everything set up in my computer museum. That'll be cool, I think we can all agree.

Yes it would! Make it speccy biased pleez!

[R-Tape]

Got interested in the Speccy scene again around 2007 I think. After all, everyone comes back - eventually..

I was about 2011, after Micromen was on the telly. Some years before that I remember a mate playing Ghosts and Goblins on his phone (or a handheld/something, can't remember) - he kept yelping that "his clothes had fallen off" and it was "ridiculously hard!". I also remember wondering why on earth he was still interested in that old guff...

[Morkin]

"his clothes had fallen off" and it was "ridiculously hard!"

Fnar indeed...

[R-Tape]

"his clothes had fallen off" and it was "ridiculously hard!"

Fnar indeed...

Actually thinking again - I'm not sure if it was a mate or a random vagrant on the canal towpath...

[Juan F. Ramirez]

[mention]R-Tape[/mention] :

As to the two emulator authors, I have no idea, their emus were not been updated for a long time, maybe someone has more info about them.

[stupidget]

I think I was still using my +2 until late 1990 when I got a MegaDrive. As much as I wanted to keep using my beloved speccy I was drawn to the idea of essentially having an arcade machine in my house. What I failed to realise was that the games cost nearly as much as I was making a week on my YTS scheme!!! As this was the case I had Streets of Rage, Toki, Gynoug (easily one of the best Shmups ever) and some crappy side scroler about magic rings. I've still got my MegaDrive and had a go on Streets of Rage the other week and it really is great fun.

I gave my Speccy collection (+2, Genius Mouse, loads of games, GAC and crash magazines) to my cousins. When I got into the Speccy Emulator scene and joined WoS back in 2003(!!!!!) I asked my cousins if they still had my speccy and they very calmly said 'Oh we dumped that years ago. We think it broke'!!!!! Ungrateful b*st*rds.

[cha05e90]

Ok, regarding the thread title: Yeah, I had similar thoughts as well. I started my computing career with a ZX81 (1K) in 1982 - followed by a ZX Spectrum (16K) in 1983. Me and my working class family did not have the money to invest in the "German standard 8-bit home computer": the Commodore 64 - far to expensive. Germany was definitely Commodore land. Nevertheless I wasn't alone, the ZX Spectrum was more or less at the 2nd place - only overtaken by the "Schneider CPC" (re-branded Amstrad CPC) some time later.

I invested my pocket money and money I earned during my holiday jobs into that system, going 48K, going to the ZX Spectrum+ "upgrade", investing in a Timex/Sinclair 2040 printer, ZX Interface 1 and ZX Microdrive etc.

In the meantime my friends made the next step to the so-called 16-bit machines, most of them to the Amiga, some to the Atari ST (and some still holding their C64s ). Around that time (1987) I (a littlebit) lost my interest in computers (I was more passionate about my motorbike back then) - nevertheless my "Sinclair workstation" was still with me. I even started to program a Mahjong clone (that I saw on my friend's Amiga) on my ZX Spectrum.

After leaving school and my military service afterwards I started my univerity studies - and used my Speccy until around 1993, i.e. doing some math stuff with it. Especially in these years from 1986 to 1993 I had the feeling, I'm the last "ZX Spectrum user" in Germany...

In 1993 I had the oppurtunity to buy a used Amiga 2000 - so I came rather late to the 16-/32-bit era (more 32-bit - it had the A2630 accelerator card installed!).

2017 was the year of the "ZX Spectrum Next" kickstarter campaign. So I fetched that ZX Spectrum (and all it's peripherals) from my attic in 2017 and I found some Masterfile database files on my Microdrive cartridges from 1992. Maybe these files are the last data I generated until 2017!

(By the way: my Amiga 2000 is still here and is used with pleasure every week - just like my Speccies...)

[PeteProdge]

Nobody at that time cared about PCs, we were all gamers, PCs were for boring word processing, spreadsheets and business propositions.

Aye - looking back now, I got a PC around 2000 specifically for word and spreadsheets. I'd forgotten about gaming and did actually want it for my "homework". The trouble is - I didn't actually have much "homework" to do!

(and prodge - how many power surges?!!! did you live via a wonky wire in a forest?!!)

To be fair, it was just three computer-zapping surges across a 12-year period. One house was particularly badly wired, and there's a side story where I could have been electrocuted just by touching a pipe near my bed.

Nowadays, all my serious electronics go into power-surge-protected sockets.