[SiriusHardware]

When I was a young electronics hobbyist in the late seventies my dad, like most dads at the time, used to go out to the pub every night and as a little part of that ritual, he would bring back three packets of Tudor crisps, one for my mother, one for me and one for the dog. Like most people reading the electronics hobby press I had seen those beautifully illustrated 'woodcut' style adverts for the MK14 and decided I had to have one, but £39.95 was quite a lot of money for someone still at school so I negotiated a deal: Instead of the crisps, my dad would give me the price of the crisps which I would put in a jar.

I kept this up for weeks on end until I had more than half of the amount saved up and then my parents relented and gave me the rest, although they still couldn't see why I would want a 'computer' or what I would do with it. I assuaged my parents' doubts by getting the machine to do all sorts of impressive things, although some - like making it play 'God Save The Queen' - came straight from the manual. I later edited the 'song data' to play several other tunes as well. That's how most of us learned, by entering and improving / modifying software from manuals and other sources.

This probably explains why I still have it although I have acquired a few machines since - it took an effort to acquire it, which made it harder to consider discarding it. I've also only changed address once since I acquired it, and that seems to have been a pivotal point at which many former MK14 owners lost theirs, discarded in a house move and later regretted, so I'm impressed that Mark chose to include his MK14 - not even his originally - in the relatively small number of items he must have been able to take to Canada with him.

My original machine's 8154 also came from Tandy (Shields Road, Byker) in the 'Archer' blister pack with the folded data sheet, which I was looking at just last night.

My MK14 is issue II so it really is a museum piece as I can't consider doing any of the mods which would bring it up to to spec, so no extra RAM beyond the 640 bytes it already has, no connections for the VDU, the Single Step hardware patch was removed during a renovation phase in the late noughties as it made the PCB look untidy. That's why I'm grateful to those individuals who have produced replica PCBs, especially to Slothie whose 'issue VI' is the most practical and functional of the lot. If I break a replica it's not the end of the world although I am already too fond of my issue VI to be able to consider doing anything drastic to it.

Although we didn't really mean it to turn out this way this 'Vintage Computing' section of the UKVRR site has become a kind of unofficial repository for all kinds of things MK14, there are quite a few MK14 threads, many now closed, which are stuffed with all sorts of interesting links, information, files and so on, in no small part thanks to Tim who is an obsessive researcher sans pareil when it comes to anything he takes an interest in.