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My first computer was a BBC micro [32k] which I bought new, in June 1983. I still own one (well two) and occasionally use it to look at stuff I did then. I joined the Viewdata explosion by joining Micronet 800, on PRESTEL. After wandering around the system late at night I discovered the Midnight Micronetters Club, a group who specialized in Colour e-mail conversations, with graphics. This led to my 'joining' the club. At the time I was very into the BBC production of Robert Graves' I Claudius, and thus chose my 'handle' for messages from the inspirational performance of Sian Philips, so I was known as Livia, especially on the chatlines.After a while I became a sub-IP editor for TMMC. As this was around the time of all the railway anniversaries (GWR-150 etc) I had a little section called 'The Waiting Room' where I posted notices about railway events. I was also responsible for updating the members room, which almost became a full-time job. However, changes in the hierarchy meant that my position was handed to another and my 'Waiting Room' pages dropped. It was shortly after this that another User Group (The CUG) started up, and I got to sub-edit a little piece on there. A while later they started adding a lot of extra charges and I couldn't afford it anymore, especially after my BEEB decided to die on me, so I parted company with PRESTEL, in about January 1990.
That left me without a word-pro, etc. So I looked around for a computer. My cousin lent me an IBM XT type machine. Another friend provided an MFM hard drive and I was off, putting together a Bitza computer. That was 1992 and I am still making machines from bits and pieces, mostly donated by kind friends and well wishers. Currently I am working on a machine with an AMD K6-2:500, 128Mb RAM, Millennium Matrox G400 Max, 3.4Gb and 6.3Gb Hard Drives, Hitachi GD5000 DVD and Traxdata CDRW2260, Deskjet 660C printer. peer to peer networked with an AMD K5:133 processor, 40Mb RAM, 4xCDRom, 6.3Gb, 2Gb and 850Mb hard drives.