Ah yes, and the anticipation! 3:05. What's going to appear??? 😁 I challenge the validity of the statement at 6:45. 😎 Also, me spots an A500.

I spent my childhood jeering at the Speccie as a C64 owner, but the truth is it was a wonderful piece of kit and the engine of the British games industry which was imo the most innovative in the world at the time. I miss those days so much...the sense of burgeoning possibility combined with the fact that it was still like being part of a secret cabal in many respects...something most people in the wider world simply didn't understand.

***** I try to do most of my professional software development using Linux (although ultimately it's hard to avoid assembling exes for certain platforms using Visual Studio on Windows).

VS2013 is beyond awesome. Why would you avoid using Visual studio? It's got to be the the best IDE around at the moment. The integration with TFS is so complete and well done it's a joy to use.

***** Not trying to avoid Visual Studio; just trying to avoid Windows. But VS is the best thing MS have ever made: this is why it's "hard to avoid": it's essentially a killer app. (MS's only remaining killer app imo.)

Totally agree. MS do a ton of things extremely badly but they do understand that their entire platform lives or dies by how easy it is to develop for and they've put a lot of effort in over the years to ensure the development tools are best in class. I love the idea of Linux and I've tried a few distros over the years but after spending the day writing code and fixing bugs I just don't want to do the same thing for fun in the evenings anymore. Must be getting old. :-) 

It was indeed!

ZX Spectrum 48k and a Commodore 64 took up all my time.

Later had an Amiga too (A600), then it was games consoles up until my first PC, a PII HP machine, 400MHz.

Dave Birkhead There may have been an Amstrad (CPC386???) somewhere in between!

Dave Birkhead Wait! It was a PCW8256! :D

Dave Birkhead I read many a book to that 'tune'

+Brian J Hoskins Yes thanks from me as well. The 48k spec was my very first computer and it used to reside in a black plastic suit case which I managed to keep for several moves. I first got when IU was a kid, but by the time I got to about 17(1991) it was lost in a move. I was not happy! thankx for the trip down memory lane.

It was actually a mixture of excitement and fear once you had loaded a given game dozens of times on one of those portable desktop cassette players, and the tape was no longer in perfect shape.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SCRIP. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SCREEEEEEEEEP. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SCRIP. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SCRRRRREEEEEEEEE BLAAAAAAAAAA BLOOOOOOO BLOOOOO BLEEEEEEE etc. 10 minutes later : "R - Tape loading error" "oh for FUCKS SAKE......."

Johnny Hewison OH YES!!!! and Horace goes skiing. gettting across that bloody road . . . .

Johnny Hewison recently my grandad passed away, I went up my nans today to clear out her loft with my mum and found all his zx spectrum collection. He has tons of them and tons of games he used to use a radio to start it up. My fav game was bomb jack ^^

Geordie in Japan trans-am! the panic of running out of fuel

Yep me too, and a nice smile to my face.

Did you ever get your +2 out? I remember them being notoriously flaky even brand new.

@@LlamaGlamaDrama : My original grey-case +2 works perfectly! No replacement belts on the tape drive yet either - and it still doesn't need one! RGB-Scart output is lovely on a modern LCD TV, and the keyboard is very nice to use for inputing all those programmes that seemed almost impossible on the older Spectrums, with their single key input style... I still have an original 48K, and a 48K+ (composite modded), but those keyboard functions are a pain to remember/work out!!

The part at 6:02 is the best 👌 🙌 ❤.

+Captain Zeppos Yes. The sound of the loading is so evocative.

Thank you for your comment. I 100% agree with you.

Yes same here, that load up noise was also used in Star Trek the movie where the alien probe attacks the water system on earth. The bridge officer Ulhura is staring at the screen with this spectrum loading up screen showing. Cool.

+kodzer1 good man Karl, remember to enjoy it and remember what it means to you during the tough times. Best of luck mate, enjoy!!

I used to get Crash Spectrum magazine through the door. Brilliant magazine and I won two competitions winning Ghost N Goblins game and Peter Shilton's Handball Maradona (terrible game). Amazing memories of the 'Speccy'.

@@blackporscheroadster6415 wow Ghosts n' Goblins... that takes me back! 👍

+Y4nn1z I will say I quote LOVED Atic Atac, its sounds were addictive and so was the game. Learning all the ways around the castle per each character.... My bro and I spent years playing the game yet in all the time did we manage to pull off a victory but 1 time. We always fell victim to "dumb luck" and "cruel random chance"....

I turned 40 the other week and it's only the last couple of years that I've really started feeling the magnitude of the time that has passed since I was a kid playing with my Spectrum. It seems like a life time ago now. Wish I could go back, for a visit! 'm sure we all wish we that - not just to relive old experiences, but to meet people who are no longer with us now. All the best!

Yeah Deluxe paint was great. I used to make little animations on it. I don't have my Amiga anymore, and Im really not sure what ever happened to it. I think my brother took it. F-18 interceptor was another game I loved. I got so absorbed into that game.

Hah, yes I had similar experiences typing out lines of code. But I usually got them working eventually. I would often get tripped up by Americanisms, e.g. center, color, gray, etc. Even though it was a British machine it used American BASIC. Hard to find those problems because you look at the line of code and you think: looks fine. Why isn't it working? Then later you discover the problem is not with you, but the fact that Americans can't spell.

Haha Merry ZXMas!

I remember amplifying the sound by plugging a cable from the sound output `ear` port to the `mic` port of the cassette recorder and pressing the record button whilst pushing the little plastic write protect tab detector inside the tape deck back to fool it into playing the sound out of the speakers. Eventually, i modded the speccy to output sound through the telly speakers so i didnt have to put up with the constant whirring of the cassette decks motor.

meetoo594 the times when you were able to improve your computer at home... :)

I'll check it out, thank you. We missed out on these computers in the 80's in the u.s. There were people who had some similar Machines, but nothing manufactured in the uk. The problem was the price, in the u.s. they were much more expensive. I'm trying to begin my collection, but don't know where to go as far as websites that sell old consoles and computers here in europe.

+Danel Esser I remember the Amstrad... (spelling)... My father's best friend worked for the company as a technician. They say if you had a good one, it was a very good machine. Sadly, they were coughed out cheaply and had a high % of going wrong compare to the Spectrum, despite being "the better machine". Sir Alan Sugar himself knew about their short comings but prodded on with production regardless . Because of my dad's friend and told him how poorly made those things were, my father has and never will trust Alan Sugar. And as for my father's friend, he opening admitted having met the guy he was the most miserable businessman you ever met. In comparison, Clive Sinclair was a well loved computer producer who was souly missed. The Sega Megadrive (Gensis) and Nintendo came in, then the PC... And that wiped out the old gaming industry in Europe. But for the most part, compared to the US Britain and Europe never experienced a gaming industry collapse or anything like that. So while I've seen people praise Nintendo for saving the gaming industry, here in the UK it wasn't about saving anything, but rather which name you happen to support. Like buying a pair of designer jeans. Eventually the foreign computers and consoles won, but there were people in the 90s still playing their Spectrums from time to time and you could get them at bootsales for a very long time, particularly if you lived in the London-South East of England. I having seen one for sale, though in a bootsale, in a decade. Other then my Atari STE, the spectrum has and always be my favourite computer. I miss the old start up sound, modern computers don't give you so much anticipation fo a game starting up, its more like fustration the game HASN'T loaded already. :-/

+Danel Esser Also, Clive predicted what the office would be like a decade or so from the 80s. I was an almost spot on vision, only a few things were incorrect like the type of computers and maybe the decor choice (basically the small details). But regardless, he was 20 years ahead of his time... :-/ Saying that, I wouldn't want to live in the 80s... I know we use to joke about Rolf Harris on the playground about things that turned out to be true. And lets not get into Jimmy Saval... Or however its spelt. And to think I wanted so badly to send a "Jim will fix it" letter to him...I've never in my life been so happy over something I never got around to posting. O_O

+Svarthammarholet JetPac was great, today we only have JPEG. :-)

Me too! Spent a fair bit of my childhood with this machine

Chuckiegg, jet set willy, manic miner

I haven't had any real trouble with my old cassette tapes. Old 3.5" floppies are a different matter though; I have a box of old AMIGA discs and to my horror I've discovered that most of them are now totally unreadable :( Still, your comment is valid I think. If anyone has important stuff and/or memories lying about on magnetic tape then they should take steps to back them up immediately. It's only a matter of time before the old cassettes start failing as well.

Same here to be honest :)

I think you're right, especially with it being stored in an attic. I would have forgiven the tape drive belts for drying out and breaking long ago!

Arse Robinson I made a video about getting up before school to play my beloved spectrum! I don't want to spam, but click my profile pic to have a look. Thanks.

if anything games load more nowadays than ever.

don't think many 360s even made it out of their warranty period!

Me too, I LOVED Dizzy! Spent many hours figuring out those puzzles.