PRICE Around £120 (if you can find one)
Night after night for a few weeks in the late 1980s, I would gaze longingly at a photograph in a copy of Smash Hits magazine. To see this object of my desire, I needed to flick past numerous images of Debbie Gibson, Patsy Kensit, Belinda Carlisle and Kylie, but there was so much to take in and admire.
For starters, there was a sleek-looking computer with a built-in 3in disk drive, a sturdy-looking joystick and a collection of 17 games with familiar names such as Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit. There was a colour TV monitor and a clock/radio, all sitting upon a smart desk. Lying in a bed in a room bereft of entertainment, it felt like the stuff of dreams.
At the time, I knew very little about computers. I’d played a couple of games of Chuckie Egg on a BBC Micro at school and my attempts at typing had been typically laborious. It meant I didn’t know that 3in disks were an expensive anomaly nor that bundled joysticks tended not to last more than a couple of sessions of Daley Thompson’s Supertest.
I didn’t even know what was under the hood of this machine – the advert merely stated that it had the memory of a whole star system! All I remember is being absolutely thrilled that my parents went on to generously buy me this amazing-looking computer for Christmas. And I’ve been in love with the Amstrad CPC 6128 ever since.
“It was clear a lot of thought had gone into its creation, allowing for a lifespan years beyond Amstrad’s expectations”
■ Pale not stale
Today, that exact same computer still sits on my desk and it has been a constant presence in my life. It has seen me through school, college, university and even work. I regularly power it up, buy games and hardware, and visit forums such as CPCwiki.eu for the latest news and chatter.
In many ways, that’s going to make
