◆ PARALLAX

BBC Micro in the school computer room. Everyone forgets about those, but that machine was something special. British engineering, solid as a brick, and the green screen was hypnotic. I wanted to take one home so badly.

Hey Cass -- did you ever get to program on yours, or was it just for class stuff? I wish I'd kept the Spectrum, even just as a museum piece. The smell of that warm electronics and the keyboard clicks -- nothing else smells like that anymore.

k_holloway, I know exactly what you mean. The TRS-80 had this specific electrical smell too, something between hot plastic and transformer oil. You don't realize how much you miss those details until years later.

Barb, thank you for starting this thread. I didn't expect to spend my evening thinking about dysentery and Americana, but here we are. It's nice to remember that we all started somewhere simple, with machines that were enormous and slow and absolutely wonderful.

The Amiga demos are still out there, you know -- people upload them to FTP sites and trade them. Nothing hits the same way as running them on real hardware, though. Those machines were proof that computers could be beautiful.

My dad said computers were a fad and we'd never need one at home. He was pretty sure of that. We didn't get one until 1996, which felt like arriving to the party when everyone else had already left. But I'm grateful we got there.

This thread made my week, honestly. Thank you all for sharing your first machines with me -- the Spectrums and the Commodores and the Apple IIs, the patience you had for cassette loading and disk swapping and mysterious turbo buttons. Here's to every machine that made us feel like we were reaching forward into something brand new.