My Goodness, we've really hit upon a rich seam of nostalgia here!

I've got some BBC Model B's, Masters etc. laying around someplace, plus books and all the rest (and, a C-64, if I remember rightly), if anyone wants to take them off my hands. Meanwhile, does anyone recognize this one (also for sale, and very rare):-

Yes, John, the BBC Micro was a brilliant initiative by Auntie. If only they had followed through, as it were. Who knows, perhaps our licence fees would now be going towards another worthwhile project, like the 100 dollar laptop!

The NEC PC 8001 series was introduced in Japan in 1979, where it quickly became popular and found applications in business and home use, due to the availability of disc expansion units and its general high performance (for that time). Remember this is 1979, so it pre-dated the ZX80, Acorn Atom, Newbrain etc!!

Back in the UK we were still fiddling about with Science of Cambridge MK14's and other esoteric gizmos with a few KB of RAM. This machine had colour, lots of memory and disc drives you could buy off the shelf and just plug in.

The PC 8001 had its own dedicated display unit (which I don't have), and I have not yet got around to connecting it to up to a monitor. I have looked for pin-outs for the monitor ports but haven't found any so far (...anyone?).

Here's one guy's story about his NEC 8001.

And here's its successor, the NEC 8801 (very PC for 1981, eh?).2

Yes Geoff,

£200 was a lot 24 yrs ago. Probably be worth £600 or more today. (and would get me a much better computer than a C64)

And lastly, for anyone inspired by the idea of running BBC BASIC etc. on your Windows desktop, here are a couple of emulator links to be going on with:-

Amiga
BBC Micro
C-64
Electron

Plus a whole load for Z80 based machines. There's a ton of this stuff out there (time now to emulate a cup of tea)!

... go on (you know you want to)!

Yeah, what about the Amiga? It was way ahead of its time then, and is still sought after today!

My first brush with computers was at school when one of the teachers gave us access to his Tandy TRS-80. We had a Sinclair ZX-80 and CBM-PETs (4K RAM I think) when I did computers studies O-level. I started with a borrowed ZX80 and ZX81 then a Commodore VIC-20 (with 16K RAM pack that cost as much as the computer and eventually went into meltdown).

I then owned a Sinclair Spectrum (my neighbour was heavily into the accessories and peripherals sold by Sinclair such as tape-drives, printers, etc) and subsequently had my eye on the eagerly-awaited Acorn Enterprise computer but it never materialised (manufacturing/development problems I think).

Borrowed Commodore C64 from then on. Subsequently I bought an Amiga 500 (great software, lots of bootleg, etc, etc) and fitted with with extra memory/clock card but my best buy was a £120 PC emulator card that fitted in the Amiga expansion slot - fantastic piece of kit since it was more PC compatible and had as many features as most higher-spec PC clones at the time.

Been PCs from then on with my first x8086/88 clone 128K RAM, 25Mbyte HDD, 5.25 floppy, 620x480 colour video and MS-DOS) that cost £1200. Took a loan out for that because I needed a PC to do my degree!

More recently did the arcade and computer emulators (MAME) for PC and this brought back a lot of memories of holidays spent in arcades at the seaside, etc. Space invaders, Missile Command, Scramble and stuff like that. Was never really interested in PAC-MAN or Mario Bros for some reason.

My first computer was a ZX-81 with a 16K RAM pack bought using my wages from my paper round. It has so many breakdowns in the few months I had it that the shop refunded my money.

This went towards a 16k Sinclair Spectrum which I eventually upgraded to 48K. Then came a Commodore 64 followed by an Atari STfm. Bought it with 512K an upgraded it to a whopping 1 Meg just so I could play Monkey Island! Next was an Atari STe with 2Meg RAM.

I eventually ventured into PCs with the purchase of a 486DX2/66 with 8 Meg RAM 420Meg HD and a dual speed CD rom and Windows 3.1. Should have cost a huge £1495 at the time but somehow the mail order company forgot they sent in and never billed me!

Many PCs later I've finally seen the light and how use a Macbook at home.

"...the other major kind of computer is the Apple, which I do not recommend, because it is a wuss-o-rama New-Age computer that you basically just plug in and use. This means that you don't get to participate in the most entertaining aspect of computer owning, which is getting the computer to work. This is where DOS really shines" - Dave Barry writing in the late 1980's (where are you now, Dave?)

Meanwhile, let's hope that Littlewoods are not avid lurkers on this forum, eh, Scottish?

Whilst I agree that there is an element of "wuss-o-rama" plug in and use with the Apple if you use one of the precompiled and packaged apps for it there is a lot of fun still to be had with the Unix command prompt to install the myriad on non-native apps out there.

The major appeal of the Apple / Mac is the significantly reduced time to boot up do what you need to do and shut down (which I often do before my wifes laptop boots Vista! But then Vista is a whole new topic!!) and the Intel variants ability to run Windoze for those that are sad enough to want it to.

Think the actual company are no longer trading (not too surprisingly) but doubt they would be able to chase up a bill from 20 years ago