Mclaneinc

I'm an age old Atari guy through and through, Atari's have been my hobby, my work and always my joy.
My first job was a teaching assistant in a Special Needs school working with children of the 12 to adult range, was a superb job with something new every day (sometimes a painful something) and it was just such a rewarding job. That said the pay was awful and I started to look elsewhere which is how I ended up at Maplin, had the pay been better I'd still have stayed there.
Computers wise I started out with a ZX80 and progressed to the Atari, I taught myself machine code and that helped get me a job at Maplin Electronics as technical sales guy, I sold, upgraded, worked on and generally spent my first 2yrs doing everything Atari, that led to me writing for Atari User and meeting many of the legends of Atari programming wise. I sold Archer his first disk drive, had regular visits from Adam Bilyard (Chop Suey, Bellum etc) and the guys from Futureware as well as certain legends in the er 'dark side', my mate was the first guy ever to be taken to court in the UK for piracy, mind you the stupid  bloke was selling them in Exchange & Mart :)
Sadly Maplin gave up on the home computers (their marketing and buyers were TERRIBLE) and I stayed on to be Dept Manager and then a year later as a store manager despite having almost zero electronics know how.
After Maplin I stayed in the computer side of things but ill health have meant me giving up work.
I have probably owned almost all home computers, even things like Sord M5's etc but oddly never a Spectrum, my love these days are my lovely wife and my even lovelier daughter Serena, my biggest hobby is emulation, that's what keeps my days ticking as well as my own consoles.
There you have it, I'm an old fart as they say ;)