I bought my first Spectrum (a Spectrum+) in 1985. It was a great machine for its time and cost. I learnt to code using the manual that came with it and can probably thank it for my career as a software developer.
I still have fond memories of that computer, the games I played on it and the time I spent hacking about on it, but it had some serious capability limitations compared to its competitors, most notably the Commodore 64, and I spent several years longingly looking at the C64 screenshots of games in Crash magazine, wishing I had gone down that route instead. Check out Paperboy on Spectrum versus C64 for example, where the Spectrum version is practically monochrome in a window that's approximately half the screen size.
I still have fond memories of that computer, the games I played on it and the time I spent hacking about on it, but it had some serious capability limitations compared to its competitors, most notably the Commodore 64, and I spent several years longingly looking at the C64 screenshots of games in Crash magazine, wishing I had gone down that route instead. Check out Paperboy on Spectrum versus C64 for example, where the Spectrum version is practically monochrome in a window that's approximately half the screen size.