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Comment by delibaltas | Hacker News Reader

Christmas of 1981 in Athens, Greece. I was 15. Father had died 3 years ago from heart attack at 42. His last words to my mother: "Educate the kids".

She did her best, given that my grandfather was old fashioned and had stopped her from going to school after she became twelve, although she was among the smartest in her class.

That Christmas she had bought me the brand new then Sinclair ZX81 personal computer. We were visiting the grandparents in a small village near Athens.

I spend the night by the fireplace with a small portable TV and the machine, typing in games published in the UK PC magazines of that time and occasionally watching the Chrstmas shows. Debugging my typos was the way I learned how programming works.

Nothing really interesting here, but I am remembering that night again and again so when I saw the prompt I felt I should share. Merry Christmas everyone.

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My dad got us an Atari 130 XE for Christmas back in the 80s.

On Christmas day, it ran a program which asked for our names (my sister or I) and then printed out a personalised message and small game.

Only years later did I really think about him setting up this program days or weeks before hand, learning to code it all in Atari Basic, for that big reveal on the day.

He always had menial blue collar jobs because of his working class Irish Catholic background, and he died before I really got into computers/dev later on in life, so I never really got to ask him about it.

Enjoy the day everyone and hopefully build up some nice family memories!

I remember my whole family playing golf on Atari 65XE - everyone: me, brother, dad and mom.

Game's name was Leader Board Tournament

1998 - my father had abandoned the family - I received a TI83 and the instruction manual. Spent literally a full week teaching myself TI83 Basic from that manual. It had everything necessary - variables, loops, functions. And I did it all hand-typing it in on the calculator keyboard!

What a great story, the perfect kind of HN post. Did Sinclair advertise in Greek... Or did your Grandma speak enough English to figure out what to buy?

I had seen advertisments in greek from the Greek importers of the brand. I had asked my mother for it and she delivered.

Since you asked for the greek market I can share one more memory. About a year later, 1982, I wanted to upgrade to Texas Instruments TI-99/4A so I tried to see a machine up close going to the local representative. I ended up at the "company's HQ" which was a small residence appartment in the fifth floor of a building.

I found the door open so I entered a room full with boxes thrown around randomely. After waiting alone for an awkward period of 5-10 minutes, the owner of the company himself emerges from the bathroom with a wet face and kind of surprised to see me. He listened to what I wanted. "It's somewhere there, go and have a look" it's all what he said. He couldn't care less.

13 years later I had my own small company and reselling PC and equimpent was part of the job. The man with the wet face was one of the biggest suppliers in Greece, since besides Texas Instruments he moved on to be the representative of Intel and Microsoft and reseller of many others and the company became on of the biggest in Greece.

Maybe his mentality ("there it is, go and have a look") never changed much though, because a couple decades later the company went bankrupt.

There definitely were ads for spectrums in Greece back then [1] but if I were to guess they were coming from local distributors rather than Sinclair.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/greece/s/N8djTsI1wC

Heartwarming story! Fellow Greek here. Also made my family take the Amstrad CPC and monitor to an 8 hours trip to the village.

I can identify with having a GREAT Christmas associated with a new computer. In my case, the same year, 1981, and a Radio Shack Color Computer, 16K Ram.

That is such an awesome story! Immediate favorite for me. Can relate to typing in the code published in the gaming magazines. Mine was with memory-editing the game values, albeit not on Christmas.

A beautiful memory. I felt like I was sitting next to you, watching over your shoulder. Thank you for sharing.

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