Christmas in 1982/3 in the UK, I was praying desperately for a ZX Spectrum so I could play Manic Miner like my nephews (who, due to a generational slip were more like my cousins) and was genuinely crushed when I opened my present to find that it was a BBC Micro Model B. The horror! Although Elite did make up for quite a bit of that, the game scene on the BBC was so much worse (or at least it felt so) and I ended up copying code by hand for games from magazines, which I'm pretty sure was what my parents intended. Fast forward to now, and I'm running a successful web agency, having worked my way through various internet-related jobs in interesting organisations like the BBC, universities and others. So a belated and slightly begrudging thanks to my dad and mum for their foresight.
