I'm 44 and i had a BBC B when i was a kid, i guess about 14 - 15yrs old. Elite was by far the best game. So high tech with a tape recorder connected to it
Me and my mates would spend hours and sometimes days inputting programs from magazines only for them not to work. Them were the days
Same age as you and yeah, we had a BBC B at home - it was originally supposed to be a Spectrum, but when Dad got us one for Christmas and found it was faulty, he got it replaced twice and then decided to buy us a BBC instead.
We used them at secondary school and to have the same model at home was just beyond awesome - I always remember Dad saying many years later that him and Mum were planning to put the money they spent on our BBC towards a new three-piece suite, but he didn't mind as the whole family (apart from my technophobe Mum) ended up using it for something or other. I remember Dad getting an uber word processing application for it - for some reason it came on its own chip that had to be fitted to the motherboard ... you didn't load it from tape or disk like an ordinary program.
My God, the memories this thread has brought back and the hammering that computer took ... however, it was hard as nails and still worked quite happily long after we'd moved on to Amigas and PCs etc. I think Dad eventually gave it to a local charity or something, probably upwards of ten years after he'd bought it.
Typing in listings or loading stuff off tape was the most tedious and error-prone way of getting info into a computer ever, but initially there was no alternative - no such thing as USB sticks in them days! We were chuffed to bits the following Christmas when Dad splashed out on a twin-slot 5.25 floppy drive, which made loading times damn near instantaneous by comparison and having twin slots, made copying (ahem) friends games an absolute doddle
That one computer had my brother and me hooked and is responsible for turning us into the gadget nuts that we are today and setting us on the paths to our future careers.
BEST. XMAS. PRESENT. EVER.
