What was you favourite ever Christmas present?

[andygates]

Probably the chemistry set.   

[Weirdy Biker]

ZX Spectrum 48k.  Xmas 1983.

The smell of polystyrene gives me flashbacks 

[PeteB99]

I'd like to say it was the 'build a transistor radio' kit about 8 or the airfix motor racing set a few years later but it was probably a large cardboard box when I was a toddler.

[Mrs Pingu]

I too had a dolls house with lights, like Kirst.
I imagine I was quite chuffed when i got my first new bike (given I'd been using a skip bike before then), but I was relatively old when that happened, and then we moved to Aberdeen and I wasn't allowed out on it 

The most impressed I remember being is when I got my first personal stereo, it wa like the musak was in my head! 

[mercury]

Yay!!!

[teethgrinder]

Yay!!!

I remember having one of those, or at least a share of one of those. They were the bee's knees at the time.
48k memory
Very puny nowadays.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

The most impressed I remember being is when I got my first personal stereo, it wa like the musak was in my head! 

Was it a posh one with a rewind button?

[peliroja]

A pink and green shiny leotard with matching pink tutu. I know, I claim not to be a girly-girl...

[Sergeant Pluck]

A pink and green shiny leotard with matching pink tutu

Was it from Woolly? 

[Jaded]

48k memory
Very puny nowadays.

Ah, you had the posh one. The entry level one had 16KB. That's the one I had. 

[Deano]

The bike, obviously.  It took me a few months to learn how to ride it, and it was a terribly cheap Tensor* BMX effort, but nothing gave me the same thrill of excitement and adventure.  Not even the Optimus Prime which arrived in the mid-80s, which was the only time I was given the present all the kids were wanting (our mam had a Christmas job at Argos, so she managed to get it cheap).

*cheapo bike importer based in Darlington.

[Wowbagger]

One that particularly stuck in my memory was a Chad Valley Bridge Building kit, with loads of interlocking plastic girders etc.

There were lots of bridges in a book of instructions but I'm afraid, being about 8 when I received it, I was only ever capable of building the simplest bridge unaided. My older brother and my dad built some very elaborate ones, including the Golden Gate bridge and the Forth Rail Bridge.

[Kim]

Commodore 64.  With the infamous 1541 floppy drive, and the world's loudest and slowest dot-matrix printer.  It was originally a family present, but I ended up spending the whole of that summer in traction, mostly in an isolation room (on account of being the only one on the children's ward who hadn't come down with the mumps), so my parents set it up for me on a couple of those hospital table things so I would have something to do.

After a while I got bored with the handful of games we had, so started to investigate the programming manuals.  The hospital teacher considered this sufficiently educational to leave me to it, which was infinitely preferable to her tedious written work.  I was only 7, with limited technical vocabulary or understanding of algebra and other useful concepts, but I patiently cargo-cult programmed my way into making it produce *my* random beeps and graphics, as well as printing "$little_brother smells of poo" hundreds of times on fanfold paper.  Quality stuff.

While I never became a real programmer, it instilled a fascination with the technology that, for better or worse, got me where I am today.

[Rig of Jarkness]

A transistor radio - How sad is that ? 

[gordon taylor]

A transistor radio - How sad is that ? 

OOOO!  Did it have a DIN plug output? So you could tape stuff?

Waaay cool.

[Valiant]

Never really got any presents, my family was poor and muslim so presents were rare or rarely lived upto expectations. I once got a set of 36 Colouring Pens though which I quite liked.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

I remember really envying my cousins who got the complete set of Crayola wax crayons one year, all the colours, even the metallic ones.

[Mrs Pingu]

The most impressed I remember being is when I got my first personal stereo, it wa like the musak was in my head! 

Was it a posh one with a rewind button?

Nah, I don't think rewind buttons were invented then 

[Mr Larrington]

A pink and green shiny leotard with matching pink tutu. I know, I claim not to be a girly-girl...

Post .jpgs or retract

[LEE]

Yay!!!

I remember having one of those, or at least a share of one of those. They were the bee's knees at the time.
48k memory
Very puny nowadays.

Really?  48k?
I guess it's time for us Speccy users to upgrade then.

Maybe if more of Bill Gates's developers grew up with a Speccy they may not have come up with an operating systems that required 1,000,000k of memory as a minimum requirement.