Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

My introduction to the wonderful world of computing was courtesy of Sir Clive Sinclair's classic ZX Spectrum -- the Zilog Z80 based machine with all of 48KB of RAM, a rubber keyboard and tape based loading/saving (many a late night were spent adjusting the volume on the tape player to successfully load the latest blockbuster game). I think I was in grade 4 or so when I wrote my first program in Spectrum BASIC and went off running excitedly to tell my father about it. It basically [pun intended] calculated the area of a rectangle/square:

10 INPUT "Please enter X: ", X
20 INPUT "Please enter Y: ", Y
30 LET A= X * Y
40 PRINT "The area is: "; A
50 GOTO 10

After that it was the 128K version of the Speccy (as the ZX Spectrum was affectionately called) +2, +3 (enter the floppy drive), some dabbling with Commodore 128 and the ill-fated SAM Coupe before graduating to PCs running x86 (starting with the 286). If I plot the computing power of the computers I've owned over time, it'll probably line up nicely with Moore's Law!

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