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ErroneousBoshtoday at 12:22 PM1 replyview on HN

> Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.

Dundee? :-D

There's a theory made popular by Chris van der Kuyl (his dad Tony owned an Apple II, the first home computer I ever used - I played the Lemonade Stand game on it in his kitchen) that the reason Dundee is that everyone had a ZX Spectrum and so anyone with any talent got good at programming them.

And why did everyone have a ZX Spectrum in Dundee? Because they were made in the Timex factory just off the Kingsway (the building is still there, it's a furniture factory now), and everyone's dad knew someone who could "get" a Spectrum for them, bypassing the usual supply chain hassle.

The Planet Bar in Lochee probably shifted more units than John Menzies ever did.


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stevekemptoday at 2:15 PM

I grew up in Yorkshire, though I'm half-Scottish there's no link to Dundee!

But the Spectrums were the best-selling UK machine at the time, so I'm sure there were lots of regions where they were super-common.

I think I had a friend with a BBC Micro, but I can't recall anybody else having something different.

(There was a bit of console-split later, between NES and Sega Megadrive, and later still between Atari/Amiga, before we all settled for big grey boxed PCs.)

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