Well of course the BBC was the best, I have 2 and they both still work. The nostalgia of the start up sound, the feel of the keyboard, the hundreds of 'serious' programs and the thousands (?) of games. All employees of Marconi were offered one at a knock down price, that's were I got my first. Using the readily available test equipment we soon had it down to basics and managed to get around the (fairly crude) protection that much of the available software had.
Happy days, thanks for triggering the memory banks.