... back to the early '80s when I first started putting racing data into a "PC". All programming was written out longhand in machine code to get the logic right, translated into binary and then input to the ZX-81 in long comma-separated strings of the binary data. It was extremely laborious, but I was fascinated by what I could make the little computer do for me. I think I managed to get in two years of data, culled from the yearly Form Book, for Guy Harwood, Henry Cecil, Dick Hern, Michael Stoute and Peter Walwyn.
Ray
I took the Commodore route! Started with PET and then the C64 with standard tape drive and later a 5 1/4 floppy drive.
The upgrade from tape to the floppy drive was like going from a penny farthing to a model-T ford. The speed, random access and capacity were outstanding compared to tape. You didn't have to listen to the screeches either.
I remember that C64 floppy drive had a flaw (or more of an easter egg) that allowed to you double the usage of a standard disk. The drive was single sided, but you could turn the floppy upside down, cut out the read / write notch on the wrong side and thus use the disk upside down thus doubling the capacity from 170KB to 340KB. I loved stuff like that and got tinkering with the I/O ports and the insides and such.
The first thing I did was to create a tape duplicator. Yes, it was possible to duplicate games on a dual cassette deck but some did not work and were rumoured to have some kind of protection to prevent it (a continous frequency, which the dual cassettes did not like). What I notched up was an adaptor to fit between the tape drive plug and connector. It was a more direct feed off the the tape deck that allowed a cleaner signal for the recording deck. It was then easy to duplicate games at the time.
Another device I created for the C64 was 'The Red Button Reset Switch". This was a device that allowed you to warm boot the C64. It consisted of a 6-pin din plug, a resistor and a small single pole press button switch, which just so happened to have a red button. When the button was pressed the Reset pin was grounded thus invoking a warm boot. Now why would you want to warm boot via a button on the back of the device? Because some games disabled the keyboard warm boot.
The games designers did not want users modifying the code so this was a challenge that had to be taken up. The reset device was built and dozens of games were hacked in order to over ride game limits. I spent hours hacking away at the machine code to find the right memory locations for things like game level indicators and ship lives. From that I worked out the poke codes to allow users to instantly start on level 5, or to have 255 lives in space invaders. That red button reset switch with a printout of the poke codes to change the game settings sold like hot cakes.
I made a few quid from those and that allowed me to go down the more traditional "IBM" PC route with proper hard drives (20MB). From there I got into proper dBase databases. I set up a nice line in programming supplying ready programmed PCs to Video Rental Stores. I did freelance DB work for other industries too. All this allowed me to purchase proper hardware and invest more time in building up DBs. So you could say it all started with a small red button reset switch.