Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

[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.