The first computer I used was at high school, way (way, way) back in the 80s.

At first I used a standalone 380Z but after a while the school added a network of RML 480Z workstations.

The machines all ran CP/M, which might appear to be familiar to MS-DOS users (for good reason). The keyboard really as metallic and clunky as it looks in the photo 🙂


For “serious” amounts of processing power (and playing Star Trek adventure game) I would connect to the local college’s DEC PDP-11/40 mainframe, via an acoustic coupler of course!


The first computer I owned was a Memotech MTX512 with FDX (twin 5.25″ floppy drive!) and dot matrix printer.

The MTX512 was just the keyboard unit, but it was much more than it appears to be – it contained a motherboard with a whole 64KB (yes, kilobytes) of RAM, Z80A processor running at 4MHz (four megahertz), onboard BASIC interpreter, and a bunch of I/O options.

Adding the FDX external drive unit gave me 80 column video (MTX alone was just 40 columns) and two 5¼” floppy disk drives.


p.s. I’d like to point out I had the MTX+FDX before it was made famous(?) in Weird Science. 🙂