Could afford a computer when I wanted one in the late 70s, so my Dad used to take me into Manchester, pretend to be interested in a Commodore PET and leave me to 'evaluate' it while he went shopping. Guy in the shop had no idea what I was doing. Eventually the school bought one but had no idea what to do with it - I remember being plucked out of class to write some software to record the results at the upcoming school sports day which I hacked together in a day. Looking back I think they needed to be seen to be making use of the investment or something like that.
In the early 80s I saved up and managed to buy a programmable calculator, the Casio FX602p which is still seen as a ground breaking device even now, there is a market for old devices and an emulator on the Apple App Store. Not a computer as such but had an alphanumeric display, non volatile memory and predated any kind of laptop, PDA etc. Still have it.
The first actual PC I bought was a 486DX2-66 in the early 90s, with a plug-in 32bit EISA card. I bought it to play Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Civilisation however in 1992 I was given a stack of 3.5" floppies by a fellow student at Birkbeck college - that night I had a running version of Slackware Linux, my games machine became a full fledged, multi-user Unix server. The skills that I then learned I still use now, as that operating system and the world of Open Source it enabled has since taken over the world and is the basis of modern cloud computing. I had to phone an order through to the US in order to get the updated OS on CD airmailed over to me.
I was also an early subscriber to Demon internet, a pioneer of dial-up. After a few years years I bought my first cable modem from Cambridge Cable, and my first ever IT job working from home became possible - in 1999. Cambridge Cable then became NTL, and of course are now Virgin Media.
