The Speccy celebrating the Sinclair ZX Spectrum

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Look at me everybody, I’m a computer programmer!!!

23 August 2026

MemoirBASIC

Cover of the orange Sinclair ZX Spectrum BASIC Programming manual, showing a glowing cityscape at sunset with the title in large outlined letters
The orange book itself — the one that started it all.

So after Christmas was over and we had returned to school in January, my older brother started looking into the orange books that came with the Speccy. In no time at all he had typed in: 

10 PRINT "Hello"
20 GOTO 10

After seeing it run, my 13 year old brain thought it was amazing. I changed the code to read: 

10 PRINT "Mike is the best"
20 GOTO 10

Within a fraction of a second of hitting RUN, I was looking around the room for praise and admiration for my coding abilities, but nobody was there.

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A £10 "untested" rubber-keyed Speccy bought sight unseen in East Java, a government import ban standing between me and a bag of axial capacitors, and a £36 chip for a £10 computer.

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A whole issue of INPUT magazine, typed in blind and left to render for the length of a coffee break — and a brother who wanted to know why none of it was a game.

It’s a fair swap, not!

A borrowed copy of Dynamite Dan, a copy-protection scheme that beat "The Key", and a brother who traded it away for Engineer Humpty on the strength of the cover alone.