What was the first computer you owned?

[grsbanks]

Worked on numerous machines before this but the first one that I actually owned outright was a Sinclair ZX-Spectrum 48k back in late '83 or early '84.

That machine taught me a hell of a lot and I've been thinking about buying another one off TAS for the sake of nostalgia. One of the first things I did on that machine was write a disassembler to disassemble the ROM. I then went through that with a fine-toothed comb to remove any disk I/O routines because I knew I'd never own a disk drive for it, use the space freed up to improve on the 40-bit "precision" (I use that term loosely) of floating point calculations, and modify the cassette tape I/O to accelerate it by about 3x.

I then proceeded to write an assembler in BASIC. I used it to assemble the guts of another assembler written in assembly language and then used that to finish the job, burn an EEPROM with my modified ROM end up with a highly customised "speccy".

Those were the days *sigh*