Hi all, being marginally younger than most of you, I remember the spectrum days, but the first I ever actually got to use without dad threatening to break my fingers was an old BBC thing that used what looked like black normal cassette tapes.

No idea how the hell it worked, but Dizzy Egg was my childhood partner.  And Postman Pat later on actually!  (It took about 20 minutes to load one game though - I remember the agonising wait in the half hour gap I was allowed to play computer games then just get it loaded before mum came in and sent me for a bath. 

What the hell was this thing?  I can't for the life of me remember!

Ah!!  The Amstrad, maybe it was the Amstrad! 

We had BBC Micro's at school for a while though.  Good old Granny's Garden!  That was top quality entertainment!  Many a rainy break-time spent hammering in 'rude' words[1] to see if it prompted a reaction from the hero, then running away or trying to wipe the text history by hitting return a few times before a teacher could see.

[1] Like 'bum', 'idiot', 'freak', 'willy' and other such blue words!

The Atari ST was an awesome machine! GEM was amazing. And it ran Elite and Ultima IV.

Your mates were the unlucky ones

ps. Yes it was the first thing I bought with my grant cheque

I'm pretty sure every decent game on the Atari was also on the Amiga, and the Amiga had 1000 others besides.

Do you know what was the decider for me? The killer app that make me ditch the Atari for good and embrace a shiny new Amiga?

Monkey Island 2.

The original had been available on the Atari, but as soon as I heard the sequal was only making the jump from PC to Amiga, the camel's back buckled.

Gotta love those 11 floppies for Monkey 2 and all that disk swapping. I had to borrow some extra drives from friends in an attempt to minimise swapping RSI!

I have to admit that whilst I had an Amiga there was one thing that the Atari ST could do better and that was MIDI... not even the add-on MIDI interface for the Amiga could compare to the simple plug and go of the ST MIDI interface