Back in the late 70s, when I was doing my A-levels I had a mate whose dad was a computer science lecturer at a college in Weybridge, sometimes he bought home gadgets and one weekend he arrived home on Friday evening with a Commodore PET (see above) in his car boot.
My mate invited me round to have a look and we must have spent a good 20 hours crawling all over that machine, mostly playing a game called "Star Trek"; a kind of green-screen adaptation of the voyages of the Star Ship Enterprise, the purpose of the game was to trek around a virtual universe gathering resources and zapping Klingons, we were enthralled and I'd never seen anything like it before.
Pretty soon after this in around 1980/81 I bought one of the early Sinclair personal computers (ZX81) and my path into a career in the computing industry and programming was set. It's funny how things turn out, I had lot's of hobbies when I was that age, things that I was really passionate about like photography, music and various sports but it was the world of software, discovered somewhat by chance on that Friday evening back in 1978, that did it for me. I sometimes wonder what I'd be doing now if it wasn't for that weekend, it's a funny old game.
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