Mike Halliday

I first encountered the Tatung Einstein TC01 back in the late 1980s. It was a purely practical buy: I snagged it cheap from a Dixons sale because it offered the BBC BASIC compatibility I desperately needed for a college project. What started as a necessity quickly turned into an obsession. I became a dedicated collector, purchasing as much of the available software as I physically could at the time. I was also a subscriber to the official Einstein user magazine. My setup was complete, featuring the original Spectrum emulator, an 80-column card, and a monochrome monitor. Sadly, as 16-bit machines and, eventually, the PC arrived, the Einstein was simply outperformed. I made the regrettable decision to give my machine away, convinced I would never need it again. But you can never truly shake a first love. In early 2019, I jumped back in, purchasing a faulty Einstein from eBay just to rekindle that old passion. That one purchase snowballed into a new hobby: I started buying further faulty machines to fix up and resell, all while acquiring original software and hardware as it became available. Following a change in my lifestyle, all that physical hardware has now been replaced with emulation and PDF files. This allows me to continue enjoying the Einstein experience, but in a much more 'transportable' and convenient manner. The journey continues!