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Comment by the-dude | Hacker News Reader

NL/The Netherlands :

Around 1984 I got really interested and there was an Acorn Electron at our local library for everybody to use.

Around 1986 I went to a new school which had a fully equipped classroom with BBC B's, server with co-processor, networked(!). We all had our own floppy disks ( not drives ), which we could save to at the end of the hour. This class was opened up during lunch-breaks.

Late 1986 : Acorn dumped their Electron stock on the marktet and a national furniture chain ( Quantum ) carried them, and I acquired my first computer for a very modest price. I still remember that day and place.

Thank you Acorn for the wonderful products and the BBC/UK for the foresight.

And here we are.

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My friends all got ZX Spectrums and had a larger pool of people to swap games with. My parents got me an Acorn Electron, which has a child i was disappointed. I loved the hell out of that thing and the lack of friends with the same system, meant i learn basic and things spiraled from there. So in a way, something i thought as a mistake turned out to be perfect.

I started reading the manual of our ZX Spectrum because when the kit arrived the tape-deck didn't work. We had a bunch of free games with the computer, but we couldn't load any of them!

No doubt I'd have gotten around to it eventually anyway, but that was the direct source of my programming career:

https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html

Mmm, our first computer was a TI99/4A, which my Dad picked up cheap when they were on sale as part of TI getting out of the home-computer business in the early 80s. Having very few commercial games for it was part of what nudged me into trying typing in games programs from books and user group magazines, which acted as a pretty good gradual introduction to programming as I had to figure out why things weren't working or try to adapt programs written for other BASIC dialects.

Wow, where was this? What library was that?

I was 12 at the time and had to take turns on my friend's BBC Micro (his parents' really). Of course, he was at the computer for 75% of the time, because "I know how to operate it".

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