AAAAHHHHH,
I feel a dedicated thread coming on about Elite! One of the all time greats - until someone mucked it around with Elite+, Elite II etc. I used to spend hours (actually all-night vodka and Elite sessions) at a friend's house 'cos he had an Acorn. I can't hear the Blue Danube waltz without thinking about buying a docking computer.
I used to write programs for my civil engineering course on a 16k Spectrum, but I used it to play games on rather more
- Knight Lore, SaberWulf and Nightshade were my favorites. How did programers cram so much game into 16K?
But saving to / loading from cassettes was SUCH a bore
And then using IBM PC and clones - no hard disks, just dual 360K 5.25 floppy drives and 640K RAM, green screens etc. But at least if you were sitting at one it had your undivided attention, unlike the DEC VAX terminals - God I hated those!
I remember a friend winning one of the first Apple Macs in a competion and being amazed at the power, the mouse and the floppy disk drive! It might even have had a hard disk!