I guess in was a natural progression from my VIC-20 and C-64. I remember watching Tomorrow's World (A UK TV science program) demo the A1000 and the next day in school all the geeks were drooling over it and I decided then that I wanted one. Unfortunately, as school kid I didn't have the money.
Spin ahead to 1986 and I joined the Army and was sent to boot camp in Reading. After passing out I was given a (what seemed) huge chunk of money and I quickly bought a C-128 which I took with me to a training school. I few months later I was sent to a unit in Colchester and I found I had even more money so I took the plunge and bought the best machine you could get: An A2000, 1MB RAM, ECS, 1 FDD and Workbench 1.2 with a CBM 1081 monitor and a dot matrix printer to replace my MPS801.
It caused quite a stir when it was delivered to my barracks. The security van that showed up at the gate wouldn't let anyone open the box to inspect the contents without my permission so I got an angry call from the RSM to "get my arse down to the guardroom and tell him what was in this big f***ing box!"
I remember the disappointment of not having anything to really demo the machine to the guys in the barracks that night.
The next day I ran down town and bought Marble Madness and Defender of the Crown.
That week I discovered that 1MB of RAM isn't a lot and "diskswappers wrist" bloody hurts so I ordered a GVP Zorro SCSI card with a 128MB hard drive and 2MB of RAM and another internal floppy drive.
As for what makes me stay, I just enjoy paying over-the-top prices for old hardware.
