My ST in the 80's was brilliant. It was a 520STFM and had a single sided drive. The first games were Star Wars, Star Trek, and Tai Pan. All of which I've managed to collect in mint condition. I used to go to the computer shows at Wembley and Alexandra Palace with my Dad. We came back on one occasion with an external DSDD drive, about 100 blank floppies (of which only about 50 worked), oh and about 1/2 dozen empty IBM XT cases. They were certainly the days.
One of the earliest hacks I did was to make the DSDD drive externally bootable, which I think was by cutting a couple of tracks to the sound chip and swapping them over. We also had an external 5 1/4" drive for it too, and used to run PC-Ditto (God knows why).
The swapping of copied games at school was rife, that and the Automation disks that used to go about. I had a little 14" Philips RGB SCART television for it.
Those were the days where you used to be impressed with the VT52 emulator and hooking it up to a PC (CTTY COM1) and getting a DIR on your ST screen.
Cover Disks were also important, as were the monthly magazines. Before I even had an ST I used to buy ST World (an American mag I think) and read that. I've still got them at home. A multiface-ST (blue one) was bought in a junk shop somewhere at a bargain price.
This was the TV advert that was being shown at the time. It was Christmas I think, maybe 1987.
. I didn't have the Discovery Pack though. It was the advert before that, I think the one where there were all the people in a dark room with numbers on their heads or something, and the screen smashed.
A friend and I used to play Bubble Bobble for hours upon hours on end. We had Competition Pro 5000 Clear joysticks. Elite was another one that was just fantastic.
When I grew up there was Centipede and Pole Position II in Sports Centres and stuff. I used to hire an Atari 2600 from the local video tape store, for something like £3 for a Saturday and Sunday. Bloody loved that!!
We also had a BetaMax C7.
Wonderful memories of the 80s.