Today in class I was asked, what was the first computer I used and I had to think waaaaay back. It also took a while.

Was it the Aston 3 I though! A primitive beast that looked like it had been made in somebody’s shed and generated TV captions. It stored everything on a fearsome looking 7″ floppy disc that could be erased by a change of wind direction.

Or was it the Abekas A72, another Caption Generator with a sleek futuristic keyboard and half a rack of hardware to support its amazing ant-aliasing powers.

Or could it have been the CMX Edit control system, driven by Unix command prompt with GPI’s for external FX units such as Vision Mixers and DVE’s.

Or maybe it the Quantel Paintbox, which was the forerunner to Adobe Photoshop but was definitely not as portable.

No it was in fact the Amiga 500.

This was a popular gaming machine in its day but we used it for generating info trivia boxes for the 1980’s Channel 4/ITV music Show ‘The Chart Show’. An illegible example of this can be seen at around 2 minutes on this clip from the show.