With the Commodore 64 turning 30 today (See: BBC News - Commodore 64 turns 30: What do today’s kids make of it?), I started thinking about my first computer, the Sinclair ZX81 (see it on Wikipedia), also called the Timex Sinclair 1000 in the USA.

Photo of Sinclair ZX81, tv and tape (c) Mike Cattell on Flickr (because I have none).

The year would have been 1982, I was an awkward teenager, and this new device changed my world. It had a Zilog Z80 CPU running at 3.25MHz, 1KB RAM, 8KB ROM, was connected to a portable Black and White TV for display and used a battery powered manual cassette tape player for external storage. We got it a year before the Commodore 64 came out in our region.

But to me, it was amazing. I could make the thing do all sorts of interesting things using Sinclair BASIC, it’s what I learned to program in, 24 lines by 32 characters at a time.

We could even play games on it, after you added the 16K RAM upgrade and typed in all the code from a magazine (or purchased a tape). This is the device that started my love affair with computing, programming and design.

What was your first computer?