Because I’m getting old….well, at least I think that explains my obsession with the 1980’s (I mostly listen now to 80’s online radio), I’ve been trying to rebuy things from my youth.
About 2 years ago I bought a beautiful original wood grained 1977 model Atari 2600… but ignore the fact that the Atari I had as a kid was the 1981 version with black plastic because it wasn’t nearly as pretty. It’s been in a box ever since we moved to Melbourne, but now I’ll be working from a cave I’m going to break it out.
But next on the list is my very first computer. When all my friends had the Commodore 64, my mother smartly decided that the Amstrad series offered far better graphics (the CPC 6128 had 64 colors, and 128k of Ram.) Of course the sad thing was that at least in Australia, the Amstrad CPC series never really took off. I could go as a kid to Grace Bros (now Myer) and they had a single section (sort of straight up row) dedicated to Amstrad product, but they had 3 for the Commodore.
My mother very sadly gave away that computer, along with all the software I’d programmed for it…and sold. Yes, at the age of 13 I sold about $500 AUD worth of Amstrad software because I’d taught myself Basic to the point that I’d come up with a program that printed fonts…. don’t laugh, fonts were rare back then.
So now I’m trying to find one to buy to add to by collection (I’ll probably buy a C64 afterwards just because I’ve never had one) but I can’t find one to buy. I’ve been monitoring eBay for 3 months, both in Australia and overseas….nothing.
In that time I could have bought a BBC Micro (very rare), a Microbee (even rarer) and the original Sega computer. But no 6128.
If you know someone who has one in the garage, or someone who wants to sell one, pls let me know. The last time I saw one was about a year ago, it went for about $200 with a monitor, I’d be willing to pay a bit more than that to own it.
