“Remember the ZX Spectrum?” the Guardian asked a few days ago. Remember it? That fragile black-and-grey box with the jaunty flash of rainbow colours and precariously attached ‘RAM Pack’ set me on a path that has come to define my entire life.
I remember hooking it up to the battered second-hand black and white portable that served as our family TV in the early 80s and loading in a copied game from tape. Brrrrr, chi. Brrrrr, CHEEEEE etc.
I remember getting it to print ‘Hello World’ 10 times using BASIC, and then modifying that to print ‘Hello Paul’.
I remember the hours of typing Hexadecimal from cheap-paper magazines smudged with sweaty fingerprints. “Is that an E or an F”. Like alchemists we toiled over our steaming cauldron of a computer trying to turn the base metal of those listings into the gold of a simple game. We even succeeded once or twice.
I remember the animated Valentine’s card hand-crafted in Z80A for my first girlfriend. Diagonal scrolling, jaunty tune, teenage poetry. She dumped me the next day for reasons I still haven’t fully grasped.
Getting a chord out of a one-channel sound chip. Creating a spinning wireframe cube. Ghhhhheestttbushhhhhterssshh. High Speed Dubbing tape-to-tape ‘sharing’. And Elite. Oh My God Elite.
Eventually, of course, like my Star Wars wallpaper and Superman duvet cover I grew out of the Speccy and replaced it with a ‘proper’ computer – an Atari 520ST.
But i still miss that little box of magic. And that wallpaper.
Paul Dyson's Blog 
Judy reckons she has a pretty good idea why your first girlfriend dumped you. I guess she’s basing this on the experience of living with me for too many years and she’s clearly sore that she didn’t think to do the same thing as your girlfriend before it was too late!