I first saw one of these at the first school I went to, however, at the time I never saw this machine ever turned on, nor did I ever use it. It stuck in my mind for the following two reasons:

1. those orange function keys along the top row

2. that black keyboard with beige surround

3. it had BBC written on it, you know, those people who had a TV channel

But, the whole time I was at that school, I never saw it in use at all - I don't even know if it worked - it also seemed like there was only one of these for the whole school. I then moved schools as we moved outside the catchment area, and the new school had RM kit, which you'll see below.

Later on, at a subsequent school, I got to use a BBC Micro, amazingly in secondary school in the 90s, but it was for a specific purpose in DT lessons. The BBCs were hooked up to specialist hardware and we wrote some very simple programs to control lights and relays etc.

I think this was probably the first computer that I ever used, at primary school. Boasting a Z80 CPU and being an education focused CP/M machine, it certainly wasn't a gaming power house, but, I actually do remember some awesome software on this machine along with at least one game that we played.

Most of the work done of this computer was in a word processor called Write, and some database application that I cannot remember. However, we had a compilation disk with a few simple educational titles on the disk, and a very basic drawing packaged called PATN (short for "Pattern" I assume)

Then, there was a disk called Hazard / Rescue - it had two programs on it, and the idea was, it enable you to create your own very simple maze like adventure game, based solely off parameters and telling it what was allowed and what wasn't - I'd never seen anything like it before.

BUT, the prize was "Flowers Of Crystal" an early graphics/text adventure that also was on the BBC Micro too. That was a lot of fun.

This was definitely the first time I saw something that was close to an actual MS-DOS based PC - the Nimbus, whilst running MS-DOS, is not a 100% compatible PC, but it's definitely education focused and had a lot of bespoke education software for it.

We spent most of our time using "FlexiWRITE" which seems to be an upgraded version of WRITE that was used on the 480z, almost identical, but had a few extra features.

There was a "demo disk" that had a load of supplementary software and utilities for the machine, and it also included two games, Worms and Train, which I played quite a lot - Worms is basically like Snake on the old Nokia phones and Train is a game of opening and closing the gates/amending the track to keep the train going round without coming off the rails.

I also discovered, once I'd learnt some DOS commands, that on the floppy disk, there was a BBC BASIC interpreter on the disk, which was nice to mess with.

So, when I was in secondary school, in the DT room, there was one of these just abandoned in the corner - it wasn't even plugged in or setup and I never saw it plugged in.

However, I knew what it was, as I'd heard about these, and I'd seen one in one of the retail shops. I also knew for sure it was an A3010, as it's the only model with the green F keys.

Looking back on it, I think it was a strange choice for a school to have the A3010 - it's definitely a home focused model, being as it had an RF modulator and joystick ports. I do wonder if this was the teacher's own personal machine.

Anyway, years later, I had one of these in my personal collection and it's a superb machine, however, I regret selling it on now as they're rare as rocking-horse-shit and pretty darn expensive when they appear.

When I first went round a school friends house, he had a Videopac. Even for the time this was quite old hat, but, it was probably my first gaming experience. The games were fun, I like it, but I really didn't like them joysticks.

He had quite a few cartridges for this machine, and we did play quite a few games. I remember a top down tank game (a bit like Combat on the 2600) but can't remember what it was called, that was fun, but I was rubbish at it.

Even now, I've always fancied getting my hands on one of these, but never really got round to it ...... you never know, maybe in the future.

Same friend who had the Videopac, at some point had a 2600 Junior - now, I don't remember us playing this all that much, but we did play Combat on it a few times, especially the tank game and the aeroplane flying game. Maybe he didn't have many cartridges for it? I can't quite remember as he only had it for a short time before upgrading to a NES.

One friend who's house I went to, his dad had one of these set up - I saw it switched on once, in BASIC, but never saw it running anything - iirc, it didn't even have a RAM expansion connected, so was in it's stock 1KB form.

This was mid 80s, so it was already very old hat, and I suspect didn't get a lot of usage considering how low spec it was.

I did find it an interesting machine though - the size, the look, it looked so cute, but that keyboard is trash ............... there, I said it.

It's a shame I never really saw this thing in action.

I knew 3 kids who had an NES, it was not that popular in the UK due to it's price - it gained popularity a bit later.

Anyway, 1 kid would invite you round to watch him play Super Mario Bros - but never let you play

Kid 2, he never turned the thing on, I wonder if he lost all his games?

Kid 3, well, we used to play a lot of Duck Hunt, Tetris and Super Mario 3 - I'm not a Mario fan, but I did really like Tetris and Duck Hunt.

The NES has never been a favourite of mine, and still isn't, I'm gonna be quite controversial here and say that I actually think the NES is 💩 when compared to the Master System. There, I said it.

Although I'd seen the Mark 1, every kid I knew who had an SMS had a Mark 2.

So, I remember playing a lot of Alex Kidd, Hang-On and Sonic, but never really saw any other games than that. However, I liked the console, loved the look of it, and really enjoyed using it.

It wasn't until getting an SMS in the modern day that I realised how good the back catalogue of games was.

Yeah, this scores highly for me.

My neighbour had one of these, I saw it running Arkanoid and Rainbow Islands, and this was what made me want a computer in the first place.

I also had other friends who had C64s and C64c's - and it was always a good time playing on one of these.

I'm not sure what else I can say, I said it all here:

• Revisiting the Commodore 64 in 2026 

One of my cousins had a 128k toastrack Spectrum - I remember seeing Kwik Snax on this machine and that really got me in to that game and loved it.

I also had a neighbour who had a Spectrum +2A "James Bond" pack and that was decent too.

One of my friend's parents had a PCW - I liked the look of this thing, but I only ever saw it booted in to LocoScript (the Word Processor that came with) and maybe CP/M on one occasion.

The "all-in-one" form factor was fascinating to me - although, not a new concept, as my brother had a CPC 6128 which had a monitor and fed power from the monitor.

I didn't know until many years later that you could actually get games for this machine.

Many of my friends had Megadrive consoles, almost all of them were Mark 1s

We played many games, but I think the most played games were Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, and we often had mini tournaments on these games

The Megadrive is probably one of my favourite consoles though with such a cool game library.

All the kick ass Sega arcade hits are all here, in all their glory.

I knew a couple of kids who had STs, and I thought they were pretty cool (admittedly, I hadn't got my Amiga yet) but even after I did get the Amiga, I never thought the ST was a bad machine, I enjoyed playing games with my friends on their STs, it was just different.

I really didn't like that bright green desktop though ............. eww