Swedish Retrocomputernerd calling. This is my Sinclair story.
My name is Lars, I was born a month before Armstrong set foot on the moon, and I've been using computers since my father brought home a ZX-81 in the early 80's. We also bought the Your Computer magazine almost every month and entered lots of the programs from there. Oh, Castles of Carmain.... Oh the memories.
Talking about memories... the 16k memory expansion, of course, was wobbly, and once when I wrote a fantastic little game (you should enter the castle, steal the crown and get out) my brother insisted on trying it before I had saved it, moved the computer and... boy, I was very close of killing him with my bare hands!
We read about the Speccy in the magazines and I thought it was charming, and when Your Computer started writing about the QL I thought it was an absolute dream!
Well, time went on. I worked at my mother's work during two summers and bought my own Commodore 64 instead of a Spectrum (Why? Well, it had broader user base in my home town - no one there had a Spectrum) and from there I moved on to the Atari ST.
At fall 1999 my father passed away, and I took care of the ZX-81. When going through the cassette tapes I noticed that he had been using the ZX to calculate his taxes during most of the 80's. He wrote his own tax calculating programs every spring.
Well, having a Sinclair in my hands again, I felt that the Sinclair computing way of life had been like a lost paradise to me. What if I had bought a Spectrum instead...
Just a few years later I found a Speccy at a flea market! I also got an Interface 1 and two microdrives.
At another flea market I found a QL power supply and thought "Maybe I'll stumble across a QL lacking this one day.... I better buy it!"
Last year at the Swedish Atari Club's annual gathering "Nordic Atari Show", a guy sold a Sinclair Spectrum 128K, Opus Discovery Double Drive(!) and lots of literature! I bought it without hesitating!
Eventually, last year I bought a boxed QL at a net auction - and it lacked the power supply (as I had foreseen!)! I got it quite cheap!
The keyboard membrane was broken (of course!) so last month I bought a new one from SellMyRetro and yay! The QL is alive!
A very charming computer indeed. Several evenings has been spent getting to know it. In short I will start programming on it. I really look forward to it!
On August 19th to 21st 2011 the Swedish Atari Club will hold their annual retro computing meeting, but from this year on, they will not focus on Atari only anymore! It will be a Multi platform retro computing gathering!
More info here: http://sak.nu/index.php?ucat=15
Even tho I am the secretary of the Swedish Atari Club, I most probably will bring my Sinclair QL this year! Or the 128K+Opus. We'll see! If it is a multi platform event I do as I please!
