(16-01-23) Blog 16 – A no-hands wheelie down nostalgia avenue

December 25th 1978 was a pivotal moment in my life.

It was the Christmas, when an eight (edited – I was six in 1978, apparently I cannot count!) year old me received an Atari 2600. It was the beginning of a life-long love affair with computers, and IT in general.

I instantly fell in love with this magical machine – with games such as Breakout, ET, Pitfall, and Combat.

I maintain to this day that the original joystick which came with the 2600 is still the best joystick ever made.

I was forever playing on this magical machine at every opportunity. I still remember packing up the boot of my dads’ Ford Cortina with the console, portable TV, and extension lead on a Sunday afternoon when we went to visit my grandparents so I could play my games in peace whilst the adults watched antiques roadshow and open all hours on the “big” TV.

A fond memory is every weekend, being able to go to the local video rental shop to borrow a couple of games for the week. Pouring over the fascinating titles of games such as Adventure, Asteroids, Bezerk, Canyon bomber, Centipede, and Missile command.

The artwork on the boxes were mesmerizing to eight year old me and to this day still invoke delight at how wonderful they were.

The Atari was simply amazing and takes its place quite rightly at the top of the games console hall of fame.

A spongy-keyed marvel

Christmas day 1982 was another pivotal moment in my life – it was the year I received my first programmable computer – the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k

The Spectrum was something else. It was something I could actually do things with other than just play games. I could write my own programs, I could build my own games, generate music, and learn things like electronics. It was a whole new world to explore, and one I’m still exploring 40+ years later.

Whilst the ZX Spectrum was not a new machine – Sir Clive Sinclair had previously released the ZX80 and the ZX81 in 1980 and 1981 respectively, the ZX Spectrum was a huge breakthrough in home computing, and truly brought computers to the masses.

It’s a fairly common thing today to have a dedicated space for computers in the home, but the Spectrum set the ground for everything to come.

My parents converted a room in our house specifically for me to have as my “computer room”. It was the old bathroom of the house – the bath having been moved into another room a few years earlier – this was a dedicated space for me to explore this new world.

It had a dedicated inbuilt desk for the computer with the TV monitor on its own raised plinth. I even had shelving for the tapes used with the machine. It was my OG nerd cave!

It has such a profound impact on me that every house I have owned has had a dedicated space for my computer(s) – this is the one I currently have…

In the early days of the Spectrum, I was limited to following the programs detailed in the accompanying books which were fairly bland (for a 10 year old), or playing the games it came with.

A comfortable tunnel-like hall

Quite possibly one of the best games ever made was “The Hobbit” – This was another breakthrough moment in my life which introduced me to the world of dragons, orcs, and goblins. At this point, I had not read the Tolkien book, but it certainly had an impact on me that made me seek out the novel in the town library.

The graphics are nothing compared to those of today’s games, but at that time they were simply stunning.

Some of the games that really make me nostalgic for the early days of my computing life are those such as Ant Attack, Hungry Horace, Knot in 3D, Lightcycles, Firebirds, Spy vs Spy, Paperboy, Skool Days, Manic Miner, Jetset willy, and Jetpack.

Even B.T. got in on the act with their “Firebird” label which produced a few games, but the one I loved was Booty which saw you play a cabin boy on board a pirate ship tasked with stealing the pirate hoard without getting caught and keel-hauled.

The music of my people

One of the endearing things about the Spectrum was its loading screen and its sounds. This truly is a nostalgia moment for my generation of computer geeks.

Quite often a game would fail to load, so that was the cue to get out the jewelers screwdriver and adjust the tape head via the azimuth screw which was positioned inside a tiny hole on the tape decks of the day. This action adjusted the tone and volume of the tape so that it gave a clearer signal to the Spectrum.

A weekly dose of geek

In 1984, a new magazine was released which would engross me every Saturday – INPUT magazine was a 52 issue magazine which taught you not just how to write code, but how things like logic functions worked and what 8-bit systems actually were. It taught you how to use memory management, and so much more. This was the piece which had been missing from my journey so far.

Until a few years ago, I still had every issue of INPUT, but they had started to go moldy in the loft, so they had to be thrown away. However, copies of the magazine can still be found online here and here.

What really made INPUT magazine so successful was the fact they catered for all the main platforms of the day, not just the spectrum. Every article and program in the magazine was written for the Spectrum, the Commodore, The Acron Electron, the Tandy TRS80, the Dragon 32, and the Vic 20. So no matter which machine you had, the magazine had something for you. It also gave you opportunity to see the differences between the platforms in how they handled data.

In 1985, I had moved away from my trusty 48k spectrum to a much more powerful ZX Spectrum 128k machine which allowed me to play more resource hungry games such as Airwolf, The Way of the exploding fist, Brian Bloodaxe, and of course – the best game to ever be made (in my opinion) – ELITE.

Another Firebird title, ELITE was the original free-roam game which paved the way for modern games such as Red Dead Redemption, Minecraft, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and many more.

The ZX Spectrum stayed with me until a couple of years ago when I donated it to a friend who collects retro computer systems. It will always have a place in my heart.

My introduction to graphical design

Jump forward to 1987 and we see the release of the Commodore Amiga 500. This was another step-change in my journey through the world of computing.

With floppy discs, a two-button mouse, 2MB RAM, and 8-bit sound, the Amiga was an entirely new experience over the Spectrum.

With the ability to utilise software packages such as Deluxe Paint, I was introduced to 8-bit drawings unlike anything I had ever seen before.

It was an amazing utility with the ability to mirror images, draw bezier curves, and use paint infill techniques – I was hooked. I would spend hours painstakingly colouring , editing and deleting images pixel by pixel.

At this point in my life, I had discovered girls, and as such computing started to take a back-seat in favour of more real-world activities. But the bug was still with me.

In 1991, I was now working and earning my own money. At that time, a company called Evesham micros was producing some of the best bang-for-your-buck home PCs.

At work I was using a 286 SX PC with 8MB RAM and an ability to overlock the CPU to 32MHz. When I saw the Evesham advert for their Vale PC, I just had to had it.

Running an Intel Pentium 90 processor with 8MB RAM, Floppy drive and CD drive – It was an absolute beast of a machine – It set me back the princely sum of £650, and I had to save for 5 months to afford it. But it was mine.

At work we were running MS DOS 6.2, but on my Vale I had Windows 3.1 – I was living in the future!

The Vale lasted me until the late 1990’s, at which point I upgraded to a new eMachines computer. Initially running Windows 95, I later upgraded to Windows 98 and finally the ill-fated Windows ME operating system.

At this point, I was now fully immersed in the www, having fitted a 28.8kbps modem to my computer, and as such spent many hours devouring as much information about computers as I possibly could.

My memory of computers from this point on unfortunately becomes a bit of a blur. The eMachines PC was the last of the pre-built machined I owned for many years. From then on I, like many others, sourced components to build my own PCs. If memory serves me correctly, I believe over the next 20 years or so, I have built, expanded and thrown away at least another 6 or 7 PCs, with each machine lasting roughly 2 or 3 years each.

As my daily driver, I am currently running a water cooled AlphaStar PC (Yes, I’ve gone back to pre-built), with a mahoosive GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card.

In addition to the Beast – as I lovingly call it, my current stable of computers consists of:

• An old PC – an Intel core i5 8400, 32GB DDR4, GeForce GTX 1060
• A HP Micro Gen8 server – Intel Celeron G1610T, 16GB DDR3
• Raspberry Pi-400
• 2x Raspberry Pi 4B’s 16GB RAM
• 1x Raspberry Pi 3 8GB RAM

My career has been a lifetime in the making – from my early years tinkering with the Spectrum ZX 48k to the beast I run nowadays, it was pretty inevitable that I would end-up in the world of IT – even though I had plans to be a Geologist.

Funny how things work out!