I do consider my +3 to be an Amstrad. For one thing, it says “(c) Amstrad” whenever you switch it on. It has the same form factor as the CPC. It used a 3" FDD because Amstrad had bought so bloody many drives and disks for the CPC and the Joyce (PCW). It also, rather tellingly, has a massive AMSTRAD logo on the circuit board (twice!).
Amstrad did quite a lot to create the +3, it’s the grey +2 that was essentially a 128K board with a cassette interface daughterboard attached (and yes, AMSTRAD stencilled on the main board).
(My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81. My second was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K+. My third was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3. Does it show?)
Stop it, you’re making me drool! I remember lusting over the Coupé brochure after the Sinclair Loki was revealed to be complete vapourware. I’ve still never seen a Coupé in the flesh.
The first computer that was actually mine was a cobbled together Pentium II that I loved dearly. However before that I used various Windows PCs back to about 3.1. I also spent a lot of time on a friend’s Amiga 500 (presumably - might have been a different model). It was powered by alien technology compared to the Windows machine I used at home.
At school we had some variety of Acorn, presumably Archimedes. I recall being taught to use Logo for a brief period and being baffled as to why. We also had some other, older computers in various classrooms. I recall using a BBC Micro but the other machines I’m not so sure on. Power-wise I feel like it was between an Archimedes and a BBC Micro but who can say what it was? I recall playing some medieval-themed game on it briefly that had an arm-wrestling minigame. Any takers on what that was?
In general though I feel like the whole programming initiative passed me by. It wasn’t long before teachers were trying to teach me the rudiments of Microsoft Office and little else.
You guys are old. My first computer came with a Pentium P5 processor, 8MBs of EDO RAM (later upgraded to 40MBs), and Windows 95. We bought it in 1996 with an amazing 14 (or maybe it was 13) inch color monitor. The machine was epic, it worked better than a tractor, although the Windows crashes were not fun. I think it’s still somewhere in storage at home, my mom kept using it up until very recently because of attachment issues.
4th here (CPC464, Atari STe, 386DX40, then P100). Funnily enough it was an Escom one as mentioned in the Amiga story.
Biggest heap of turd ever, that exercised the W95 bluescreen code excessively.
Glad they went bust.
Fixed by binning the 100MHz mobo/CPU and replacing with a Pentium 233MHz, which was my first ever online purchase.
The computer we had at home when I was a kid was a Commodore Amiga 500. At school we had Acorn Archimedes (around one in each classroom in primary school, separate computer rooms in secondary school).
I also had a friend with some PCs, mainly running OS/2 but also DOS and Windows 3.1.
When I was about 13 it all moved to Windows PCs, then I first installed Linux at around 16.
A friend of my Dad’s is after some old Spectrum hardware, for nostalgia I think. Not sure which/how much of mine I am ready to part with, and at least one +2 has non-working sound due my attempts to give it stereo via the home-brew ACB system someone came up with.