The office had just been kitted out with Unisys B21/29 clusters (re-badged Burroughs) with their own Asynch. networking (I forget the pin configurations but I lost many gouges of skin making up cables for them).

As a result of this, there was a first-come, first-served on buying all the old Burroughs for a quite princely sum of £30 and the onus on collection left to the buyer.

I didn't have a car and mine was at Ipswich !!!!!

And it weighed just shy of 22Kg and was a swine to carry due to it's offset weight and shape.

Eventually, via taxis, trains (sitting in the guards van - as you could in those days) and considerable expense later, I had my heavy, noisy, all-in-one unit and a set of 5.25" floppy disks

The key to all of this wasn't the machine itself but the installation disks that came with it. I wondered by the office machines still had their password protection but mine had been removed by the installation disks. On looking at the documentation - borrowed from Marketing department's developers - who wrote POS quotes systems on the Unisys (and also PCs), I found out the detail on how this all hung together and then proceeded to play, hack and convert boring office processes - e.g. post-it notes into a rudimentary email system and write games.

Nightmare Park - ported from memory from a Commodore Pet game played as a kid
Murder at the Manor - a game written for the Apple ][ back in the early 80s

And, finally, a simulation of the boss's favourite fruit machine in the on-site social-club "The Ritz". I must say that this was rather good - although I spent a lot of time watching other people playing it in order to program the B21 and porting the code to work - likewise, something you could so easily then.

I think it was the request to the 'proper Devs' on how to scan the keyboard for keystrokes rather than a synchronous 'wait for input' such as INPUT a$ that led to a "stop mucking about and get paid for doing this stuff"

I was delighted !!