Atari 800XL

"10 print I am the most awesomely awesome person of up most awesomeness"
"20 print goto 10"
run

And that was pretty much the extent of my programming abilities at the time which that line of code upon hitting enter on an atari 800XL computer would see it repeated down the screen infinite times or at least till you decided it was actually pretty shit and chose to play a game instead.

the aforementioned computer was pretty much the first piece of gaming tech i owned (well ok it was for all of us but its mine dammit all mine). Where as most of the more spoiled richer bastards with their rich bastard parents either owned a Commodore 64 or a ZX Spectrum we made do with the atari which bore more similarities to the C64 than the Spectrum. It came with a tape player to load your games during which time you could write a whole thesis on exactly why cartridges were cooler while at the same time listening what sounded like a cat being held underwater as it loaded. upon loading of the game (lets say we were playing the Lone Raider) you would see a screen that said BOOT ERROR reminding you that you forgot to wind the tape head on via use of a pencil or pen and have to rewind' wind on tape head' and start the fucking procedure all over again (20 mins now wasted and no closer to playing the game)

FINALLY the game was loaded after hearing flight of the bumble bees played with really shitty electronic synth for the second time. There weren't many games that did this it was usually BRRRRRRRZZZZZZZ SCRRRRRREEEAAAAACCCCHHHHH BUUUUUZZZZZZZ WAAAANNNNKKKEEEEERRRR well ok maybe not the last one but anyone familiar with dial up internet (basically any third worlder £2 a month types with net access) will know what that sounds like.

And so on it went ten - twenty minutes to load a game that had the entertainment value of 5 mins. There were of course notable exceptions Feud was a good 20 mins from start to finish as was The Ninja not to mention seasonal games such as Santa's Special Delivery.

Ok who are we kidding nostalgia set aside your specs had to be seriously rose tinted to look back and say that there were anything other than a handful of games worth a wank on this system. Which is a shame when you consider that on paper at least it had similar specs to the C64 but precious software support and to be fair the only games i could afford were in the 2 - 3 quid bracket. The cartridges came in at a pocket money busting tenner a pop and were little more than perfect versions of the games you could find on the earlier Atari 2600 games console (in its whole life the cartridge slot was only violated once with defender and felt dirty for it)

If it wasn't for the fact that we actually had an imagination back then i probably would have thrown in the gaming towel thinking there couldn't be anything in it from my atari experience.

 It was a half decent system at a half decent price that less then half a fraction of the UK population ever owned and those that did wouldn't own up to it.