A lot of my friends and specially my wife  ask me frequently what do I see in these little computers, and of course most of them think that being busy with them is just another waste of time. They might be right and I certainly can’t explain my feeling when I switch on one of my species.

The story stared somewhere in 1983 when I received my first speccy back in formal Yugoslavia. I did not even know how to switch it on. There was no switch on button . My English is still not that good, yet back in the time it was terrible. All manuals were in English , so I had to do it all by just trying. It took me only one week to find out  that you can't connect anything to spectrum before you switched it off. I remember still the moment that I tried to connect a joystick interface while my rubber speccy still was on. I cried and cried .... I had to send it to Zagreb (Croatia)  because in my city Bihac (Bosnia) nobody was able to repair it. I had to wait almost a month to get it back. After this little adventure I was a little bit more careful with my Speccy. I remember the prominent role of Spectrum in my childhood. Not many of us in formal Yugoslavia ( now Bosnia) had an opportunity to have a speccy like in the UK. All my friends came to my house to play with speccy. Even my teacher at school asked me to demonstrate it in front of the whole class. That was a happy time and we all have enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately, the war in Bosnia throw a spanner in the works and my mother had to sell my speccy stuff to buy food. Due to a love story  I've came to the Netherlands before the war and never went back. I had it all living in a nice country as the Netherlands, however I missed my speccy stuff. That feeling drove me to write an advert in a local paper , and ask people whether they perhaps have some speccy stuffs that they do not need any more. I've received few boxes with a lot of speccy stuff. The ones that did not worked I have thrown away. I still regret that. I might have thrown away some “Issue one” boards as well. I had my speccy stuff again, however I did not used it for a long time until I found “Spectrum for Everyone group” on Facebook. Due to help of this group I have learned to repair some speccies, and I’m fully back to the speccy world. It feels like I never been out it. I’m happy again like I was back in the eighties. Eventually playing with my speccies might be a waste of time, however this is a feeling that I can't express.

P.S. Every time when I'm back to Bihac, I try to find my old speccy back.