I was introduced to the ZX Spectrum by long-time, on-off family friend, Alan Green in late 1982. I’d go round to Alan’s house and sit in the corner of his lounge, where he had the Spectrum hooked up to a portable tv, and play the early games for it with him.
Alan always tried to get me interested in programming for it, too, saying I should work my way through the manual, which had examples and an index of every command that could be accessed from the Spectrum’s rubber multi-function keypad. Initially I gave that kind of thing a wide berth, as playing games was so much more fun than all the heavy duty stuff.
By the time I got my own Spectrum for Xmas 1983 I was right into it, though, writing loads of little programs in Sinclair Basic – most of which would draw random circles on the screen, or ask you for your name before PRINTing it out in random colours (Or pseudo-random, in the case of the Spectrum – there’d always be an emergent rainbow pattern that formed if you filled the screen up with “random” colours).