I bought my kit at Hobby Data in Sweden 79. Worked hard whole summer (just started high school). My grandfather was a carpenter and made me a wooden case for it and the keyboard. Learned to program Z80 and hand assembler. Many notebooks with mnemonics and hex-code. Built 8k of RAM, bought ZEAP Assembler. Wrote a BASIC interpreter. And ever since that time have I worked with product development. I''m glad NASCOM taught me a profession. A computer a student could afford.

I remember building one of these while at college learning to become a TV engineer. It got me interested in computers and led to me working for the same college (I''m still there after 24 years!). We had 8 of these which we used for microprocessor $ control systems courses. They were mounted in 2U rack cases and expanded to 16K. I was so impressed with them that I built one for myself. The one problem I had was with the siting of the keyboard cable which would produce spurious characters until re-routed away from the power supply. I still fondly remember programming in assembler on these machines.

$$ Was I only only person to make use of the 8 bytes of "spare" ram at the end of each display line?

No, I remember that well. Often these days, when writing some code and allocating Mbs to a memory array without a thought I think back to those days when every byte counted.