30 years ago this month I bought my first desktop computer

It was an Amstrad 3086

I remember it well, I was 23 at the time and I had signed up to do a degree foundation course on the Open University and I needed a computer, the options back then for the course were the Amstrad 1512 and 1640 or the newer 3086 or 3286, I could just about afford a 3086 with a paper white SVGA monitor, 5.25 and 3.5 floppies, 32 MB hard drive, MS Dos 3.3 and GEM graphics environment manager a bit like an Apple desktop back then. It came with 1 megabyte of RAM but only used 640K, it also had a 22K modem which I never used, by comparison my Apple macbook pro which I’ve had for years now has 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD drive. I think the 8086 was 8 bit running at one megahertz and it was all the computer you needed back then where as my now old mac which I still use daily is 64 bit a 2.4 Ghz core duo processor.

I had office software called Framework 4 which had database, spreadsheet and word processing, I had a few freeware games but only a paper white monitor to play them on, I also had a dot matrix printer.

I did all of my course on the computer and it also taught me how to use the computer effectively, the course was called T102 Living with Technology and I remember it was really difficult, there were modules on running a power station, designing a house, cleaning up pollution and some maths and use of a computer, there was a movie in the 80s called Educating Rita, she had done the English Literature version but it was the same level. I was given an offer to study at Aberystwyth University while I was studying the course, I dropped out of Aberystywth and a year later but funnily enough I remember a computer science lecturer said once at the end of a lecture that Star Trek would never happen for one reason a computer would never be able to differentiate different accents and similar sounding words, I think we all know that he turned out to be quite wrong. I went to Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education and studied an HND and topped up to a BSc in Business Information Technology. I had very little money in my first two years and I remember I had a very basic PC with an amber screen monitor but when I got to the third year I was given full funding for my degree top up and I remember buying a really nice computer a pentium 120 I think which I had for that year.