Started with a Speccy 48K, so a bit better than the ZX81, but still miles behind Zeph's Amiga. That little thing rocked. I would spend hours re-typing snippets of code printed in the back of Your Sinclair magazine, only to find out that I'd typed a B instead of an 8 or a zero instead of an O somewhere, and the whole thing would fall over. VB it wasn't. No fancy IDE, no colourful text as you typed commands, and no helpful debugger either.
I also have fond (er... kinda
) memories of listening to the screeching sound of loading games by tape, only for it to fail and you'd have to start all over again.
I still remember rubbing out the keys by playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon so much and hammering the keys repeatedly
Oh, and ruining loadsa Kempston joysticks too when playing things like Outrun or Combat School or Uridium or Green Beret or Zaxxon or....