New Zealand Vintage Computer Forums

Hi - my name's Ed and I'm in England.

The first computer I can remember playing is a BBC B - I stumbled over Terry's YouTube channel and really liked watching the videos. I like hearing about the early days of computing from a different perspective (and New Zealand is about as far away from me as you can get). I remember playing games such as Frak, Chuckie Egg and Castle Quest. Most of all I remember playing Elite - the game that got me hooked on computers.

Next up was an Atari STe with a whopping (for the time) 4mb RAM. It wasn't used for anything but extra ammunition in the Amiga vs Atari debate. My love of Elite was cemented with the excellent Elite 2. For my birthday my parents offered to buy me a Sony Playstation when it came out. But I didn't want that! I wanted the excellent Atari Jaguar. I was laughed at by my friends but that little console had some really great games for it. I tried firing it up the other day but it appears to have lost it's sound (poor little mite).

Since then I've just gone down the PC route but recently have been thinking about collecting Atari machines. There's just something about Atari machines that I like and I think I'd like some more of them. I'll probably look for a Lynx and a replacement Jag first but I want to try out some of the computers.

Anyway - introduction over - I'm off to continue learning about the Challenger 1P and 4P.

Hiya Ed and welcome to the forums!

Yes, we tended to get a mix of machines in New Zealand in the 1980s....some from the UK, some from the USA...some from Australia like the Microbee. Also Hong Kong via various distributors like Dick Smith with the System 80 and VZ-200. And lots of Apple II+ and 8088 clones from Taiwan!

New Zealand did have a few native models such as the Poly for schools (It didn't get the penetration of that the BBC did in the UK thoug). There seemed to be a few local Z80 based CP/M boards produced, from the odd advertisement I remember seeing in NZ mags.

Hi Ed

asphix wrote:The first computer I can remember playing is a BBC B

In my last 2 years of secondary school, the computer lab was all BBC based. The entire class shared a 360k floppy disk that was connected to a machine on a network. Fun times back in the late 80's.

Considering the previous school I was at up in a small country town had 2 Apple II's (in a room the size of a small broom cupboard), a computer lab was a dream come true. It was also the first (and last) time I used a BBC.

I like hearing about the early days of computing from a different perspective (and New Zealand is about as far away from me as you can get).

In that case, you might find this an interesting site - its a university-related project to archive the history of Computer gaming in the 1980's in NZ and Australia.

Good to see more people on the forum.


Kev.