How a Plucky Little Home Computer Shaped My Childhood
Posted: Monday, January 25, 2010
by Andy Thomas
BigAngryDog.BlogSpot.com
"So... can you actually talk to it and just tell it what to do?", I asked a kid at school.
The year was 1983, and my friend had just got a home computer, a Tandy TRS80. I had never seen a computer, and I was absolutely fascinated.
I visualized sitting in front of this thing and speaking out instructions, such as, "Please calculate 6 times 7."
"Menus?" I really was confused! Now I visualized sitting in a restaurant and reading out a menu to this thing on the table. It didn't make any sense.
At school, I was pretty much in bottom classes in everything - except, that was, for art. "Well, he's good at drawing," I recall a teacher once telling my parents. I was 12 years old, and I didn't know it then, but a plucky little British home computer was about to change my life.
That computer was no other the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, which I got for Christmas that year. In fact, I had already found where my parents where hiding it and had pilfered the instruction manuals, which I read cover-to-cover, several times, before Christmas day.
The Spectrum came in 16K and 48K flavours, and I was lucky enough to get the 48K one. To this day, I can still remember standing in the computer shop with my Dad while the salesmen explained just how massive 48 Kilobytes was!
"No matter what you do, you will never fill it," he said.
Yeah right! Good job I didn't end up with the 16K one is all I can say now.
The Spectrum, or Speccy to its fans, had an unusual rubber keyboard which, as bad as it was, represented an improvement over the membrane keypad of its predecessor - the ZX81. Like most home computers in the UK at that time, the Speccy had its own built-in BASIC programming language. Programming it using the weird keyboard took some getting used to though, as each BASIC keyword had its own key, and there were weird input modes which allowed you to access the shifted keywords.
Programs were loaded and saved onto audio tapes using a cassette player. It could take up to five minutes to load a program, and the loading process often failed four and a half minutes in. But this really made the whole experience worthwhile - if a game was worth loading, then it had to be worth playing. It added value to the whole experience
In any case, although I played games occasionally, it wasn't playing games that really did it for me - it was writing them. Or at least trying to I should say.
I primarily saw the Spectrum as a kind of creativity tool - a blank canvas on which I could digitally paint interesting stuff, whether it be games, scientific programs or whatever. It was my introduction to computers, and it taught me at a young age that computers should be fun and that programming can be a creative and rewarding enterprise. I have never let go of that and, in later life, I guess it helped me not to be succumb to the notion that software development can also be a bureaucratic and soul destroying experience.
Anyway, back to my childhood and the Speccy...
I soon picked up Spectrum BASIC from the user manual, and before long, I was writing games. I wrote quite a few of horizontal scrolling games, to which I gave names such as Shuttle Defender and Sea Harrier Attack.
Unfortunately, no one told me that the age of games written in Spectrum BASIC had begun and ended in 1982 with the "Horizons" cassette that came free with every Speccy. So I soldiered on, oblivious, and sent off demo cassettes to the likes of Atari and Arctic Computing. I even got a courtesy reply once.
Eventually I decided there was only one thing for it - to set up my own software house, which I called Saturn Software. I spent a whole week's wages from my paper round on a pack of five audio cassettes. Would five be enough? I wasn't sure, but it was all that I could afford. If the orders came flooding in, I would just have to buy some more.
I put a hand-written advertisement for Saturn Software in the local paper shop and, while I waited for the telephone orders to roll in, I loaded the cassettes with my Shuttle Defender game. I also painstakingly drew the artwork for each cassette inlay by hand, and for that professional touch, I colored them in with felt-tip pen.
Tragically, the one and only phone call I got was answered by my Mum.
It was a rather menacing call, apparently, where the caller claimed to be from the police and threatened to prosecute me for software piracy. I was duly made to remove my advertisement from the local shop, and that put pay to my first ever business venture.
It didn't put me off though, and I carried on writing games and other programs. I had a creative urge, an internal spark, that kept me awake at night dreaming up new projects.
I had come to realize, however, that Spectrum BASIC just wasn't going to cut it. If I was ever going to get a game published, then I had to learn machine code. Unfortunately, coming from a small town in Northern England, I didn't know how to access the kind of information and learning resources for this. The Internet would have been really useful to me around this time, but this was before the Web, or even the Information Super Highway for that matter.
At least back in those days computing was safe however. There was no danger of me coming into contact with chatroom paedophiles or getting myself extradited to the US because I had clicked on something I shouldn't have. There's a part of me which bemoans the day my personal computer became connected to the rest of the world, or more specifically, when the rest of the world became connected to my computer. I guess I'm a little nostalgic for a time when your computer was your own.
I did, however, get my hands on some computer books from the local library - both of them. I recall that one was about Expert Systems, and while I was fascinated, I could not quite grasp what they were actually for. To be honest, I still don't. Did anybody?
There was one person I could ask. My best friend was an electronics genius, and while I spent my evenings writing Speccy BASIC, he spent his with a soldering iron and an assortment of circuit boards with 555 timers on them. He also knew machine code, and I begged him to teach me. I recall him giving me a verbal crash course in Z80 assembler while we stood on his parent's doorstep. I remember it all had something to do with shift registers and interrupts, but it all went over my head and I didn't understand it.
In fact, I never did have much luck with publishing a game for Spectrum. All my games were written in BASIC and were, well, to be honest, a bit rubbish really. But my efforts were not in vain, and the Spectrum did indeed have a profound affect on my childhood and, I suspect also, on my later life.
When I was given a home computer as a Christmas present at the age of 12, I was pretty much written off at school. Over the next two years, however, my school work dramatically improved and I was lifted out of the bottom classes, and in the end, I did very well.
The truth was that, as a child, I didn't really understand how to interact with people and found the whole experience confusing and uncomfortable. So I would just disengage sometimes. But I could understand and interact with a computer quite easily, so I used it as an outlet for my creativity, which otherwise, may have remained locked up inside. In the process, I learned a great deal and became interested in many things.
I didn't learn too much about people though. People remained confusing to me, whereas machines were interesting and made sense. Unfortunately, this outlook didn't prepare me well for later life, which I was about to run up against. So, I guess, my overwhelmingly positive childhood memories of growing up with the ZX Spectrum are tinged with a little sadness.
Undoubtedly, however, the ZX Spectrum helped to shape my childhood for the better, and I wonder sometimes just how my life would have turned out without Sir Clive Sinclair's marvellous little machine. Not as well I think.
This article was originally published on the Big Angry Blog.
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