In a recent posting at Freeware Dave's, David Burton mentioned Old Computer Net a site featuring ancient computers, including the Timex Sinclair 100, my first computer.

Yes, I possessed a computer way back in 1982...at least seven years before I finally used one.

I forget in what magazine I first saw the full page ad for the Sinclair. Own your very own computer for $99! As a long time reader of science fiction, as someone who remembered the days when computers filled entire rooms and only NASA had them, how could I resist a pitch like that?

Mind you, I didn't have the slightest idea what this modern wonder was supposed to do for me. I wasn't launching space probes. But it sounded neat and I guessed the utility would become obvious once it arrived.

I was wrong.

The Sinclair wasn't exactly user friendly. You hooked it up to a television set and if you wanted to save anything, you also needed to attach it to a cassette recorder. There were no programs to speak of. The user needed to type in programs and save them to a tape.

My knowledge of computers was nil. I didn't even know, except in the vaguest terms, what a computer program was or that a computer needed programs to enable it to do anything. I had just assumed the Sinclair would...well, you know -- work. *Do something* Like my television set.

Many years later I did learn enough about very high level programming to write a few computer text adventures and by then I could have typed some programs out of a computer magazine into my Sinclair, but by then it was long gone.

I wonder how many of the hundreds of thousands of those machines sold were ever used?