Yes, this is a football blog. And no, this post isn’t very football-related, but it’s something that we all have in common. We’ve all, at one time or another, used a computer to surf the Internet and visit EPL Talk. So I thought it’d be interesting to hear from you, the readers, what your first computer was so we can get a better idea of how far we’ve all come.

The idea for the story came up after I had a conversation on Twitter the other night with EPL Talk reader Azbats. I noticed he had an avatar that sported an image from an old Commodore Amiga bouncing ball demo. And the conversation developed from there.

For me, my first personal computer was a Commodore Vic 20 which I got for a Christmas present either in 1981 or 1982. The reason I ended up getting a Vic 20 instead of a Sinclair ZX81 or BBC Micro was because I was pretty comfortable with the Commodore PET computer which I had used in school in my computer science class.

Some of my earliest memories of using the Commodore Vic 20 were learning to program in BASIC, playing music with the impressive (at the time) built-in sound effects, and laboriously typing in tedious computer programs which were printed in magazines but finding out that nine times out of ten they didn’t work because I had typed one character incorrectly. And trying to find that erroneous character was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

I don’t remember having many computer games, but I do remember owning Football Manager which seemed to take forever to load on the cassette tape player as the psychedelic colors flashed on the screen while it loaded. I had the pleasure of interviewing the creator of Football Manager, Kevin Toms, a few years ago for the EPL Talk Podcast (you can hear that interview here).

After I moved to the US in 1984, I got a Commodore 64 from my local K-Mart store and spent hundreds of hours using that to play football games, run several bulletin board systems (BBS) and to get up to all sorts of trouble.

What was your first computer? Click the comments link below and share your story. I look forward to hearing from you.