What did you do in the years BEFORE your Speccy?

[PeteProdge]

Obviously, this has potential to go really off-topic, you know, not having a Speccy in your life, but if we concentrate on the coveting of one, the desire to be part of this home computing revolution, well... that should do.

Especially if we touch on what we thought owning such a computer would be like, and how it didn't necessarily match up to that.

I have a story. It's a very long one. It's taken me a couple of hours to write and I know this forum is not for a personal blog, but I think it's got some funny moments and it's tale of expectations going quite skewiff with reality, against a backdrop of utter poverty.

[PeteProdge]

Extremely long personal story of becoming a Speccy user that does have a point, honest

My story, well, I grew up in harsh poverty for just over the first ten years of my life. Not that I need to play the Hovis music, but to give you an idea: An outdoor-only toilet and bare floorboards (with a small dash of lino) in the seventies, no sign of a fridge or automatic washing machine, and we had a two-bar gas fireplace for the only warmth (no central heating until we moved in the early nineties), hand-me-down clothes, weekly bath, that kind of thing that made us on par with Albert Steptoe. Pretty far from 'the white heat of technology', or indeed, any heat.

We did have a spell of having a colour telly and a car for a year or two, and even resided in a semi-detached middle class home, but my perpetually unemployed father couldn't maintain that for long, so back to a terraced house with inch thick ice on the windows during winter. Sorry to come across like a boomer meme, but this is how it was and so I'll jump to the recreational side of things...

Cycling. Lots of cycling. Our father had my brother and I cycling as young as possible, taking us on journeys that would go up to eight miles out each Sunday. We got fit from that. My obsession was television, I had little in common with my frugal parents, so I'd be glued to children's telly in the afternoons and Saturday mornings. And, wary that this is now the third paragraph, this is how the Speccy caught my attention. Well, home computers in general really. They were being covered on shows such as The Saturday Show (Central's disappointing follow-up to Tiswas) and something called Video And Chips. I never did catch BBC's Micro Live, but certainly was wowed by computer graphics appearing on screen at any point. Quite common for some of the new TV services in the early 80s to have computer-designed graphics for titles and idents (think of that Channel 4 logo).



First interactions with any kind of computing device

My first experience of playing any kind of electronic video game was at infants school with some kind of Zolyx-style game on what must have been the BBC Micro. Not that any child was allowed to touch, we had to tell the teacher which area of the playing area we wanted to fill (when I say 'Zolyx', it was more like a turn-by-turn version of it), and they'd do that, so it was playing it by proxy. I still to this day don't know what that game is.

Also in the early 80s, somewhere in a side street behind Northampton's Abington Street, there was an arcade, first time I had been in such a place. My dad had zero interest in any video games, but was probably more interested in the gambling side of things. I was allowed to walk around the corridors of this place and maybe it's a false memory, but even without any coins to spend, it was heaven seeing these things in attract mode - all with black backgrounds. There may well have been yer Space Invaders, Asteroids and Pac Man there, but for some reason I was fascinated by Amigo, just twisting and moving the joystick so I felt like I was 'playing' it. Hmm... that too is also a bit Zolyx-like.



Okay, using the ZX Spectrum for the first time

I'd be watching these shows on micro computing and picking up bits from them. In Boots, there was a collosal line-up of all the eight-bit computers ready for anyone to tap into. From memory I can remember the then-new Amstrad CPC being there. Having no clue about the differing formats and why specifications were important, I 'rated' them on my neophyte experiences with them, just doing the usual 10 PRINT "pete is really cool" | 20 GOTO 10 thing. The font on the CPC was pretty cool and I liked the colours of the keyboard. Couldn't get much out of the C64. There were various ones with black-and-white displays and notoriously one I could never work out. There's a flashing K on the screen! But as soon as I type a letter, an entire word comes up and the K turns into an L! "BORDER? DRAW? PLOT? I can't type exactly what I want to! This is definitely a terrible machine, the worst of the lot here!" is pretty much my conclusion of what was my first ever go on a ZX Spectrum. Yeah, funny how that turned out.

At some point our local chippy had Sega's 1982 Carnival as the first resident arcade machine. It's not great, but that ate a few of my ten pence pieces. Most of my pocket money went on comics, first the Beano, then I preferred the more anarchic stylings of Whoopee!, Whizzer & Chips, Buster, Wow, that kind of things. Any depictions of computers in these things would be of the huge reel-to-reel mainframes that would be in a business's backroom staffed by 'boffin' scientists. That was pretty much derived from the way 1970s sitcoms would acknowledge computing.

There was no way our parents could have afforded home computers, with them seeming being more expensive than televisions. There was a sequence on Hartbeat (follow-up to Vision On) where Tony Hart showed viewers how they could make their own 'computer' out of card and transparent plastic. Very much the kind of thing you'd see in a pop-up book. It was one of these demonstrations where "here's one I made earlier" really sped through the process, making it seem so easy to make. You'd press a 'key' and it would lever up an 'alien' onto the screen. I genuinely thought this would be my saviour for home computing, that's how naive I was.

My friend, Ryan, in the next street, just as creative as me, his family (quite a hippy couple) always had lots of arts and crafts about their house. Well, some old cardboard boxes and scissors anyway, so I tried to recreate that 'computer' as best as I could, without the transparent plastic screen. We sat in the street, taking it turns to play our version of Space Invaders. Yes, one of us would have to control the aliens and the other would move a bit of paper about to 'zap' them. Unsurprisingly this did not exactly replace the videogaming experience, and we had lots of rows about our alien kills.

These days Ryan Lambie is probably better known in the retrogaming scene as the founder and editor of the Wireframe gaming development magazine, plus he's written lots of books on pop culture. We have constantly reminded each other of our 'analogue' approach to playing Space Invaders. It does come off a bit like your grandmother telling you how she used gravy browning to draw lines on the back of her legs "as we had no nylons during the war".

This was also the era when during BBC's downtime in early mornings and afternoons, they pump out the Ceefax teletext service on screen with some terrible lift musak. That felt to me like our telly had a computer plugged into it. Sure, it was boring news reports about inflation, unemployment and parliament, stuff I had no interest in as a kid, but it was exciting to me. Like an 'attract mode' of digital current affairs!



Anyway, our junior school acquired a BBC microcomputer around this point, and this got reported on in the local newspaper, complete with headline and photo of the staff crowded round the keyboard and monitor. The headmaster even invited the entirety of the rival junior school, to walk a mile over ours to see this computer. Well, to us, those kids were the enemy from the rough estate, so at any glimpse of them, we'd pull faces and shout "durrr" at them, because that's how caring and nice we were.

Still, there were very occasional opportunities for us third-years to actually play on this machine, but it had to be two of us at a time. It was always some educational game, and I can't remember coming across the ubituous Granny's Garden at all. At one stage, my partner pressed a button that caused the game to stop responding. I don't know what it was, and he was absolutely ashen-faced, genuinely thinking he'd broken the school's new 'crown jewels'. The head teacher summoned a fourth year kid who knew about computing and had him attempt to get things going again. He couldn't do it. Oh dear.

Then I hit upon an idea. One of those many 'here's how you can get into BASIC programming' segments I saw on telly really stated the importance of typing RUN to get your program launched. So I typed exactly that, and the reactions of everyone there when this worked, made me look like I was using an electric torch in front of a lost Amazon tribe. They were gobsmacked at my ingenuity. How laughable that is, with hindsight!

By the final year of junior school, there were kids with computers in their homes and much giggling about the rudeness of the name Jet Set Willy, not that I knew what that was. Acorn Electrons and Spectrums seem to be prolific, but to me, they were all just computers and I was desperate for literally any kind, regardless of format. I didn't know anything about incompatibility, surely all games work on ANY COMPUTER, right?

Games addict

In the summer of 1986, our family may well have been skint and dad still jobless (unable to hold down employment due to his, um, questionable old-fashioned attitudes), but we had upgraded to a colour telly (albeit portable) and had our first fridge and washing machine. (Still no VCR or phone, so we were quite the social pariahs in that time.) This was more down to my maternal grandfather being especially prudent about his finances, offloading a chunk of it to my mother to avoid a higher level of taxes. (Well, he had worked for the Inland Revenue.) We always went on a fortnight's holiday in England or Wales, each parent taking a turn. On even-numbered years, dad would pick the tranquil rural village type places that we kids found tediously boring (the kind of thing I really love now though). We had our mum's ear and she'd go with the more bucket-and-spade choices, where there'd be neon lights, piers and candy floss.

Still, dad's turn in 1986, who fancied the literal holiday village of Clarach Bay on the mid-Wales coast. It's just a caravan park. Sure, a nice sea view, but there was nothing to it, fourteen days in a caravan with a portable telly in the midst of Mexico '86. Still, my first actual memory of being in a country that wasn't England and there was some novelty in watching S4C and seeing SuperTed in its original Welsh. Well, that dissipated as we could barely decipher a word of that language. There was some respite, if you were prepared to walk for half an hour along a cliff trail - yes, a path right by a crumbling cliff - you'd be in Aberystwyth town centre. Not great, but you could actually be on a beach instead of being 100 foot above it.

Oh and the other thing that edged me closer to getting a computer. The caravan park had an arcade. Very heavy on the video games, a time when they hugely outnumbered the coin shovers and the fruities. And boy, I didn't realise how video games had come on in leaps and bounds since playing primitive games on a black background in a chippy. That holiday was defined by these coin-ops:

• Pac Land
• Kung Fu Master
• Wonder Boy

There were many others, but those were the ones I played most often. Full-screen scrolling and plenty of colour. Wonder Boy was a riot of colour and music. There was a kid four years younger than me who mastered the basics of the four levels and could easily go to level eight on one coin. I was apalling on my first few goes, but got pretty good in the end. Pac Land was my absolute favourite. I'd still run out of coins that I had begged my parents for and spend an hour just watching other kids and adults play these games. Looking back at that list, Wonder Boy is the only new game, the other two being from 1984, but they were all magnificent in my eyes.



Other than that, I'd spend time in the caravan drawing cartoons. I was known for being a budding cartoonist, making my own comics in the school holidays. I came up with the idea of 'Comp-U-Comic' - a computer game idea as a comic strip you could 'play' with your eyes. The idea was that you'd turn the page where there'd be a 3x3 grid of drawings and you start by looking at the central panel and then look up (or left, or right, or down, or up/left, oh you get the idea) as your 'joystick'. Your eyes should now be on the result of your 'eye joystick' action, you might have crashed into something or dodged an enemy! Yes, this was an extremely stupid idea, really unworkable and untenable, just as daft as 'playing' cardboard Space Invaders. Absolutely bonkers. I gave up after a few pages.

In case you were wondering, the 'game' I devised had you controlling a rogue dodgem that had to avoid other dodgems and baddies. What a waste of felt-tips, but a totally original idea, I insist.

Daniel Harris, Sinclair fanatic

Back at school, a new kid had joined our class, his family had relocated to Wellingborough. Even though he was living in Victorian terraced housing like the majority of us, his dad was doing well, because this kid had a computer. And a printer with it too. Hell, one day he even came into school with his portable television, very nervous about switching it on, he mostly kept in his desk all day, out of sight from the teachers and indeed everyone else. We got on extremely well, I was obsessed with computing and he didn't know anybody and was very keen to show off his kit.

I'd go round to his house for dinner, and couldn't wait to play games. Games, right? Well, Daniel was also keen to point out the practical side of his computer. He loaded up VU-3D during dinner and then showed the wine glass and how you could tilt it about and printed a few images. Space-age silver paper! That was magic! And I'll never forget him giving me this slightly less-than-altruistic 'gift' from this printer, derived from BASIC:

10 PRINT "peter is nealy as cool as daniel"
20 GOTO 10

A bit of a mickey-take, but I did enjoy pointing out his spelling error. He insists that it had to be "nealy" because one more character meant the phrase didn't sit on one line.

We did actually get to play a game. He stuck in a cassette tape, did a few taps and pressed the PLAY button and so I was expecting to immediately pick up his joystick and get zapping those aliens, right? Nope.

A horrid screeching noise came out and there was this mad frantic dancing barcode around the edges of the screen. THIS COMPUTER HAS GONE WRONG! Well, that's what I thought. Daniel explained that games had to load. I had no clue whatsoever. Bear in mind, the school's BBC ran off floppy disk and that was pretty much rapid and 'invisible' loading in retrospect. Here on the Speccy, what was this horrible noise? Why did we have to wait through four minutes of it? Is Daniel really sure this isn't going wrong?

The game - I think - was Chuckie Egg. I really enjoyed this, despite being utterly abysmal at it. Not sure how I got to the level with the moving platforms, maybe Daniel just played it to that point and let me take over. I really really was awful, but it didn't matter, I was in control of something on the television screen! Magic!



I was obsessed with Roland Rat at this point, and noticed Daniel had Roland's Rat Race by Ocean. Of course I wanted to play it. It featured my breakfast-television Blakey-from-On-The-Buses-voiced rodent hero! "No, it's utter crap" explained Daniel, refusing to load it. I didn't understand. How could it be crap? It had to be good. Hey, I never did catch up with Daniel when we finished junior school, never saw him again and he definitely moved, but that was a Sinclair-obsessed household and I'm surprised he's never been on WOS or comp.sys.sinclair. Maybe he moved to the Atari ST or Amiga or something? Daniel, if you're out there, you were definitely right about Roland's Rat Race.



At some point, reading the comics in a big newsagent hoping not to get caught and being a huge fan of Oink!, I saw the image of Uncle Pigg on the cover of one of those glossy computer magazines on the shelf above. Oink! had made it into a computer game and again, I really wanted a home computer so much. After all, this was another thing I was so into, there was simply no way the game could be rubbish right? Ahem. (Thanks to the internet, I now know I was looking at Zzap! 64.)

Getting the Speccy

My parents knew that I was heavily into technology. They'd turn to me to work out "these new BT Phonecard things". In 1987, when I was asked about what I wanted for my birthday, I said a computer, which left both parents quite shocked but they knew that these things were becoming commonplace. They could see my obsession with them in arcades and how my junior school teacher told them how good I was at custom BASIC routines (via pen and paper, not on an actual computer) and how I took to the Logo programming language on the BBC.

What computer though? To me, all computers were pretty much the same. I had this carefree "oh, any one will do" outlook, but thankfully I began to think harder about it. The very name 'ZX Spectrum' did stick out to me, it seemed to be the most common in the playground. Hey, that's what Jet Set Willy ran on! That's what The Saturday Show used! What a name! I totally forgot all about the flashing K stuff (never did mentally assign that with the Speccy, it was just 'a computer') and the necessary minutes of screechy loading noise.

The local newspaper carried an advert from Currys (or was it Dixons?) showing a 128K ZX Spectrum +2 with lots of games for just £135. Nobody in our family had a present cost so much before. My dad got me a mountain bike two years before which I didn't like (because all the cool kids had BMXs and I felt like a wet drip taking cycling way too seriously and you can't do the 'stunts'), which cost nearly £80. Still used it though, so I really was one of those kids who did get out and about. But that of course was about to change to completely the opposite.

Also in the advert was a much cheaper option. For £99 there was a computer that came with a monitor! A green-screen monitor, but hey, £99! And it's from Sharp! That's a name we've heard of! My mother was very insistent on that one, yeah, the price point obviously being the factor there. It did look rather dull. The software was for accounting, word processing and there might have been one or two games of a primitive coin-op knock-off variety. Let's be honest, it was a business computer first and foremost, and not even a good one. Friends at my new school told me Speccy was the way to go. They had them, of course. Loads of these kids had attended that rival junior school I mentioned earlier!

One kid was heavily pressuring me to go down the MSX route. Well, he owned one and in his eyes, they could do no wrong. He'd wave Your Computer (at that point, probably one of the only magazines covering it) at me, insisting the graphics were way better than the Speccy. But no, my heart was set on the Spectrum. It was just a name that stuck with me, even though I'd largely forgotten about Daniel Harris's Sinclairphilia.

My dad put up half the money from his DSS payments. My mum actually pawned her engagement ring, a sacrifice I'll never forget, just we could enter this digital age. (I cited this at her funeral a few years back). A spare portable colour telly we were looking after for my uncle (who was in prison), would be assigned for this brave new digital world we were about to enter. Well, I say that, but my dad never had any interest in computers whatsoever. He did stare at the screen on the day I switched it on and loaded a game, but aside from that, had literally ZERO span of his attention. Sure, he handily wired up the plug (remember that electrical goods came without them), but computing of any type was not his bag. He liked gadgets, like tape recorders and would continously play late 1950s and early 1960s music, usually ballads and novelty songs. He pretty much lived his life like it was the 1950s. Not even bothered about The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. He would switch on Radio 1 purely for a Sunday show called Old Record Club, fronted by a now-very-disgraced disc jockey playing rightly-forgotten records. Still, some caveats because it introduced me to this comic brilliance and this pre-goth pre-shock-rock genius. Anyway, I'm rambling, back to the Speccy...

13th birthday - a Friday, I get back from school, literally sprinting home. I've got the whole weekend where I am now a computer owner. I don't even know the importance of having 128K. I don't even appreciate the addition of AY music because I wasn't really there for the 48K era. I've not done my time plugging in an EAR cable from a tape player and facing failures (and if I had to, my dad had many of those to spare). In many respects, I was lucky - no hassle with the tapes when you have a +2! Thanks, Sir Alan!

In goes the first tape - it's Ocean's Donkey Kong, a game I vaguely remember from some smokey arcade somewhere. This'll be fine. I hit the play button on the tape deck and I'm ready to start the ga... Aaaaargh!!! What's this horrible noise? My family are as perplexed as I am, it's utterly horrible.



Then I remember. Flashbacks to Daniel Harris's house.

"Oh yeah", I say. "It's got to do this 'loading' thing. It does sound like it's going wrong..."

"It looks like it's going wrong too!"

"...but it needs to do this to get the game running. Erm... trust me."

And the rest, they say, is history. Wow, you've made it this far. The mountain bike didn't get used that much afterwards, I gave up cartooning and focused very heavily on playing games, and also had spells of trying to make them.

[hitm4n]

I was blown away when a friend of my Uncle who worked at the local college, from the AV department, was very naughty and brought a Commodore PET round to "our house" simply to show it off. It wasn't meant to leave campus. Massive heavy thing, i remember my dad had to go out and help him carry it in from the car.

We played Star Trek, all ascii, took eons to load from the slow cassette deck (took 3 attempts to load as i recall.)
But what a game! We were warping, scanning, shooting klingons, finding starbases. I remember seeing very little else on the machine.

I was 8, it was 1979.

Xmas 1981 comes around, i sooooo wanted a computer but never dreamed i could get one, they cost thousands...
But i got a ZX81! Holy moly, that set me on a path for life. I was now 10 years old.

While i was loving my ZX81 in all its mono and silent glory, my uncle got a Spectrum 48k (in 1982) and i was wowed by the colour and sounds. Manic Miner and Skool Daze were a couple of early games i saw. THIS, this is what i needed in my life...

And come christmas 1983, i got one of my own. Never even asked for one, presents like this were unheard of.

Before owning a ZX81 or Speccy, what did i do? I guess i played with Lego, Evil Knievel, Action Man and matchbox cars. Lego has never left me, but not many toys got a look in after joining the home micro world. Growing up in the new emerging home computer scene was fantastic, the new TV shows, type ins from Ceefax, Sinclair Programs each month (if i'd saved enough up). Swapping tapes with friends in the playground. What a time...

i think i was very lucky that my father was very much a cutting edge technology freak. Our house saw an Atari2600 before the ZX81, a Dragon32 around the same time as the Speccy, i had an Atari800XL for a time, then an ST which i swapped for an Amiga (love love love the Amiga).

Still emulating all these machines to this day (played some Amiga today).

[AndyC]

My dad bought a Speccy in 1982, because he thought computers were going to be an important thing at work and he'd need to understand how they worked. I was just five years old, so I had no idea what one was nor why anyone should want one until he plugged it in and showed us.

And I was hooked. It was a magical black box that let you control the television. And thus began a lifelong fascination.

[1024MAK]

Drooled over the computers in WHSmith, Boots, Woolworths etc. (well, I say etc. but Dixons were not very keen on letting kids play with the computers in their store... I can't remember if I had a play in Rumbelows). and typed in simple BASIC programs. Keep in mind that at first, the decision on which computer we were getting had not been made... This was 1982 to 1983. The ZX Spectrum 48K was eventually bought in the run up to Christmas 1983. Then packed away until Christmas Day.

Oh, and used one of the two Acorn BBC B computers at school when I could.

Mark

[flange]

I had a wry smile on face upon reading that PeteProdge had an outside toilet as that was standard issue in the era and area where I was born and in my case shared with a household consisting of nine of us, along with gas lit streets, coal fires and associated smog, peggy tubs and dolly blue, I never realised it was poverty as everyone around us floated in the same boat and only in retrospect do I deem it thus, (still don't have central heating) but no best leave it there as I know there can be no common frame of reference and also somewhat off topic.

What was I doing before the Spectrum/Sinclair other became part of my life?

Where to start? Well all through the 70's I was earning my living as a working musician ( first string plucked in 1961 last one in 2009) as well as being a director in the family business.

I was primarily a guitarist/bass player with some vocals chucked in (literally) but after throwing a triumph Bonneville down the local by-pass and doing something unmentionable to my chord hand I then mainly worked as a drummer as guitar work was too painful. Like most things in life we tend to hold onto that which denotes a time and place, I still have my instruments, a couple are vintage and also a nice pillar box red 1961 drum kit.

My hobbies at the time were in the main an extension of my stage life insomuch as the stage amps I used were designed and built by myself as I wanted my own standards of sound and reliability at the end of the day and not Tom Jennings (VOX) or Jim Marshall's version of events. Whenever I had to do a 1960's night my VOX AC30 may have looked the business for a touch of Beatles type 60's nostalgia but inside was a fan cooled 125 watt RMS wall shattering amplifier of custom design and not Dick Denney's 30 watt downhill-with-the-wind- behind-it, unreliable puff and gasp device.

I also, for stage and just for fun, built my own effects units and had a general interest in electronics too which became sidelined when the cost of designing and buildng ones own amps and effects became prohibitive thanks to the likes of Velleman and other such "kit" purveyors taking centre stage.

Then came the 80's and with it the first airings of what we now call the 8-bit era and I became as entrenched in this new venture as the ones before but was unsure which way to jump.


So why Sinclair's wonderful devices?

Well unlike most here I came at it from a slightly different angle, unlike those who saw it as a games console which was a party I came far too late to so my interest in them was one of computing. I was born in a time when they were still referred to as "electronic brains" and were fed and watered via punched tape Baudot-Murray readers with ferrite core memory still a thing and in the main were only used for mathematical and/or scientific works.

These wonderful contrivances were operated by men in white coats and were used in the purview of these individuals only.
As a small boy growing up and reading of these wonderful devices I dreamed of one day owning such a thing if it was possible no matter how far out of reach that would be and regardless of the popular wisdom opining that only a handful were needed to serve the nation.

One day Fred lad one day.

That day came around for me when the ZX80 hit the shelves which whilst largely bemoaned as not being a very good games machine I found it also wasn't a very good computer, I still have one although it's modded for SD card reading,composite video and a nice cool switching reg to make life easier (purists burn me now!) .

Then came the ZX81 which possessed an operating system,floating point arithmetic, trigonometrical functions in fact all the things needed to behave like the "electronic brains" of my youth except it didn't cost the national debt of Nicaragua, wasn't the size of a bungalow and yes it was mine all mine! The fact that it came mathematically fairly intact feature wise I feel is because the engineers behind its design IE Jim Westwood and friends and even Clive himself came from that old school of computer design and wanted it to behave like one of those old sluggers and to myself, in the now as it were, I look upon Sinclair computers as being the bridge of what went before and what came to be, except that for a windows machine I would have to buy a decent maths package for any kind of mathematical musings and no "calculator" doesn't count ( pun intended ), whereas Sinclair included most of what was needed in the ROM, again a throw back to an early way of thinking.

I had many happy hours with the 81 seeking out things for it do computing wise, became interested in Forth (despite that slow dreadful incarnation from Artic) even tried the Tree-soft EPROM version which although hardware based was still sluggish and despite protesting its Fig-Forth credentials, was/is in fact nothing of the sort and which no standard works at the time were usable on it, and allied to a terrible fast load/save tape system made me despair of ever having a decent Forth system on the 81 and in fact had to wait till fairly recently for that to become a reality thanks to a Brazilian genius, but I digress.

All hail the Spectrum.

I bought my first one (48k rubber key) from a chap at work (for seventy of your lovely British pounds sir.) mainly because Abersoft Forth did hove onto my horizon and jolly good it was too. This along with chess programs various made the Spectrum a delightful distraction on long winter nights until the beast expired and joined the choir invisible. A good deal of time elapsed until one day a young nephew asked did I want his old ZX81 (did I ?!) oh and also his Spectrum 2A as he was heading into Amiga country?

The answer was a resounding yes, I was delighted with the keyboard and joined at the hip tape deck which blissfully ran all the chess, maths,Forth programs plus some cipher works of my own and remains to this day my go-to Spectrum computer for all the aforementioned tatting about which, whilst serving nothing of note, keeps me blissfully happy of an evening along side my Zeddy musings.

Today?

Well about fifteen years ago I acquired an EPROM programmer which would work on either the Zeddy or the Spectrum, (old 25v devices for the use of sir), and whilst the vendor assured me that the soft-ware contained within the box of delights was for the Zeddy it turned out to be for the 16 or 48k Spectrum. Not being confident that I could plug the device into the 2A with out fire works I purchased 48+ Singapore model the one with a decent looking board and more sturdy plastic keyboard tails for a very good price ( remember those days when sellers were realistic in their ambitions and not plain greedy?) from the ubiquitous auction site beloved of the masses and I have to admit that EPROM burning is its sole raison d'etre these days with the 2A performing grunt duty.

In conclusion I have experienced three eras re computing, the days of the "cough,gasp and wheeze" behemoths of old, the Sinclair computers and other 8-bit oddities along the way and now what I would call today's computing, although because of the rapid rate of expansion in that field I would decry "today's computing" as a somewhat nebulous term. I have created nothing of fiscal value with them, programmed nothing of note except for myself, but here's the thing. I use my Sinclair computers every day from the early evening till early morning, week in week out and still derive the same pleasure and wonderment when something goes right as I did forty years ago, be it designing a UDG in an 8x8 square for someone's game on the 81 or listening to album tracks at a decent quality on the same machine thanks to the work of an unmet lad in Sweden.

I believe they will be a part of my life till journeys end so I say long live the Sinclair computers!

My thanks those who read this far.

[Guesser]

Before I got my first Speccy I just had to make do with a Pentium 4 running Windows Millenium Edition

[Sham Mountebank]

Pete, I just want to say that's a great post. Your mum pawning her engagement ring is a remarkable sacrifice. I hope she was able to get it back.

I don't have anything nearly so significant to say. I remember a few kids bringing Nintendo Game & Watches into school, and I encountered the occasional arcade game in the wild, for some reason I've got a really strong memory of playing Dig Dug at an otherwise unremarkable service station. Then, out of the blue my school brought a ZX Spectrum and a BBC Micro. And then games started to appear; Trans Am, Atic Atak (we had arguments about how that was pronounced. Was it "Attic Attack" or literally "a-tic a-tak"), Horace and the Spiders and Hungry Horace, Ant Attack, and Manic Miner (none of us could get past The Menagerie and we speculated about the later levels of Manic Miner between rows about the pronunciation of Atic Atak).

No one ever touched the BBC Micro. No one knew how to make it work.

And then one day in late 1984 my Mum and Dad came home with a ZX Spectrum and the 6-pack of games. I don't know what made them buy it. I'd probably been raving about the games I'd played at school and they thought it was a good way to shut me up.

[oO cozy Oo]

My childhood started with a Grandstand video games machine 1980 ( bat and ball ) then we had an Atari woodie and wooow it was great to play space invaders in the living room, then we moved to the Vic20 as this had a keyboard, but I did not see anything better than the atari,I did use a zx81 but gave up on that, then we had a zx spectrum 48k and this was the best thing as all my mates had one and we swapped games so this was great.
After a while we moved onto the 16bit systems as the amiga a600 was the best system to me before the IBM PC computers.
Looking back the ZX Spectrum was amazing I did have have a 128k toastrack with the game "never ending story" but the extra music never appealled to me"so the 128K did nothing so I gave Up as this died.Looking back the Toastrack was the best one out of all the zx spectrums.

[1024MAK]

Before I got my first Speccy I just had to make do with a Pentium 4 running Windows Millenium Edition

You could have got a decent computer like a Victor 9000 / ACT Sirius 1. At school I was offered two weeks work experience (this was I think, in 1985 or 1986). So I got to play with some Victor 9000 / ACT Sirius 1 machines running MSDOS and GWBASIC



Mark

[Mpk]

a comic strip you could 'play' with your eyes

Sounds like a CSSCGC entry if ever I heard one.

[stupidget]

My first memory of anything ‘computery’ at home was my dad coming back from work with a Binatone Pong Machine he’d borrowed from a colleague. It really was an eye-opener and it really felt like the future had arrived. Yes, in hindsight, it was a ridiculously simple console but as a family we huddled round the tv for hours playing tennis, squash and the multitude of very similar games.

At this time in my life we lived in a cul-de-sac which gave me the best childhood you could possibly imagine. Loads of kids the same age, playing out after school in the summer until it felt like it was way past you bed time. Hide and seek, Hackey-Hackey 123, Queenie Eye, climbing the lamppost to touch the bulb, skateboarding, making jumps and then riding off them on either a tomohawk, chopper, grifter or a commando, home made go-carts with wobbly wheels and everything you’d imagine a kid in the late 70’s would do during the summer. Come winter time I only remember the ‘bad winters’ where we had so much snow that some of the older lads actually built an igloo. Sitting at the radio first thing in the morning to see if your school was closed, and no ours never was, it must have had the best heating system in the whole of the Black Country!!

In our street we had a mix of families. The one with the boozy wife, the one with the strict dad, the bloke who lived on his own who was clearly a murderer, the family that moved in under police protection and yes there was no proof of any of the above. The one family that lived next door to us had a huge back garden which they sold to a developer who built a housing estate on it!! Yep it was that big. Suffice to say they made a shed load of cash from the sale and that’s what started my obsession with them. Within a few weeks they’d got a VCR, a microwave oven, they used ‘real’ butter ALL THE TIME and not marg from a massive tub, had Heinz tomato soup and not watery red nonsense from Safeway, they now had 2 cars (!!!) and an Atari Woody!!! This was almost a thing of fiction and going round there house every day after school to play Adventure, Night Driver, Spider-Man and Pitfall was just a joyous experience for a the 6 year old me. A couple of years later we ended moving to another house in 1981 and my dad said we should get a computer. We went into Wolverhampton town centre and traipsed around the various computer shops and tried the TI-99/4A, Vic20, c64 and a Speccy 16k but for some god forsaken reason we decided on a Dragon32! At the new house I’d made friends with a group of local lads and exactly how many of them owned a dragon? I’ll tell you, 1 and he was an obnoxious toad of a child and I resented having to spend anytime with him to copy games. Thankfully the Dragon died several times and eventually my dad demanded a full refund and we made the right decision and bought a 48k Speccy in 1983 much to the delight of a 10 year old Stuart.

[MarkRJones1970]

Also in the early 80s, somewhere in a side street behind Northampton's Abington Street, there was an arcade, first time I had been in such a place.

That was probably the one that was in Fish Street. I went in there a few times and remember being stunned by 'I, Robot' in there as my mate played it.

I think it was situated where 'The Optimist' is in Google Street view, though it could also have been the building to the left of it:
https://www.instantstreetview.com/@52.2 ... 6LEOQS0tgw

[PeteProdge]

That was probably the one that was in Fish Street. I went in there a few times and remember being stunned by 'I, Robot' in there as my mate played it.

I think it was situated where 'The Optimist' is in Google Street view:
https://www.instantstreetview.com/@52.2 ... 6LEOQS0tgw

That's it! Many thanks!

All these years, could never remember exactly where it was, but I recall it not being far from the market and tucked behind/around Abington Street somewhere. And it's not like Northampton's a faraway town I've only ever been to once, I'm ten miles away, I frequent it quite a lot. Bring back Buddies!

Also, if I were to continue my story into the Spectrum owning years (like it's not already long enough), Northampton's Comp-U-Serv would have a role to play as I seemed to pop over there about every year to have the rewind or stop key repaired on my +2's tape deck, and I'd see the PCs and 16-bits on display getting better and better each time. It made me feel like a dinosaur noticing a far-off asteroid in the sky.

[Mpk]

We had one of these sexy beasts :



The Ingersoll Battle Command. Check out the amazing box :



It had 2 cartridges, Sports ( 10 games, all variants of Pong ) and Combat ( 10 games, all variants of Pong ).
It was great.

There were occasional tabletop games in pubs on holidays ( always either Moon Cresta or Ladybug ), and sometimes an evening in an arcade proper.
Turbo and Pole Position were my faves in the pre-Speccy era. Didn't mind a bit of Hunchback. That's also on my Tinder profile.

[5MinuteRetro]

Before my Spectrum I had a Philips G7000, which I learned only much later in life was the European name for the Magnavox Odyssey 2.

I would've got it in around 1980-81. I remember it fondly. I got my Spectrum 128 in 1985/6, so there's a four-year period when I either had that G7000 or nothing. Bizarrely have no memory of how or when I stopped using the G7000, or otherwise got rid of it. I'm pretty sure that by the time I got my Spectrum 128, I no longer had the G7000, but no idea why.

Not unlike @PeteProdge's situation, my mum didn't have much money (my dad did, but by then they'd split and my dad was intentionally not financially supporting my mum). She bought my Spectrum from the Co-op on the never-never (hire-purchase/credit), for my Christmas or birthday present. She'd never used credit before and it created one hell of an argument with her then partner (not my dad) when he found out. I remember listening at the top of the stairs as he shouted at her to take it back, while she told him: "You'll be leaving this house before that computer goes back". Go mum!

I've also learned today that, in terms of specs, the G7000 really wasn't all that worse -- and in some respects was better -- than the Spectrum.

I was also reminded of this piece of awesomeness: a G7000 with a built-in screen! I remember wanting this more than anythign else in else in the world, but I never got one. Again, I learned only today (or perhap was reminded) that it was a black-and-white screen. What a waste for the glorious colours generated by the G7000.

[bluespikey]

Went out, played in the street. There were no cars back then, more importantly there were actual children. They seem to have disappeared along with the sparrows and starlings. I think the magpies got em.

My children are 8 now. When I was their age in 1983 I would go out on my bike just shouting cheerio to my parents. I'd then cycle across my housing estate, through the gap at the back onto the industrial estate, then along to where the empty plot was. The rumour was it was a bombed factory, but now was a mass of old brick walls and bushes. We'd meet up and build dens and fortresses in there.

Oh bloody hell no if my boys attempted to leave the driveway without me these days.

[MarkRJones1970]

That's it! Many thanks!

All these years, could never remember exactly where it was, but I recall it not being far from the market and tucked behind/around Abington Street somewhere. And it's not like Northampton's a faraway town I've only ever been to once, I'm ten miles away, I frequent it quite a lot. Bring back Buddies!

Also, if I were to continue my story into the Spectrum owning years (like it's not already long enough), Northampton's Comp-U-Serv would have a role to play as I seemed to pop over there about every year to have the rewind or stop key repaired on my +2's tape deck, and I'd see the PCs and 16-bits on display getting better and better each time. It made me feel like a dinosaur noticing a far-off asteroid in the sky.

When it was newly opened I was the Software Buyer at 'Serv-U' in College Street next to the chippy. Is that what you meant? Worked there for a couple of years then went back when I was doing the planning for 'Flood 2' for Bullfrog and I was out of a job. That's where I started collecting retro games. People would bring in their old Spectrums and games to part exchange for ST's or Amigas. I would go through each box and pick out originals of games I only had a pirate of and amassed quite a collection original titles.

Here's by 'Business card'


I did the cartoon on the carrier bags:


A very busy window display I did for 'The New Zealand Story' in 1989 (just after leaving Ocean):


Then, when I went back part time in the 2nd half of 1990 'Games X' came in and interviewed staff and customers:

[PeteProdge]

When it was newly opened I was the Software Buyer at 'Serv-U' in College Street next to the chippy. Is that what you meant?

Ah yes! That'd be it, I got the name a bit wrong there, but yes, definitely in College Street and I can also picture the chip shop.

Worked there for a couple of years then went back when I was doing the planning for 'Flood 2' for Bullfrog and I was out of a job. That's where I started collecting retro games. People would bring in their old Spectrums and games to part exchange for ST's or Amigas. I would go through each box and pick out originals of games I only had a pirate of and amassed quite a collection original titles.

I may well have met you. My mother would pay for the Speccy repairs. On the last occasion (probably 1991), someone there said to her "don't tell him, but the Spectrum's on its way out, people go to Amigas these days". She revealed that to me a few weeks after it happened. I guess that made it easier when the time came to get an Amiga for my birthday.

Also, thanks to you and this thread, yesterday evening, after working in Milton Keynes, I decided to go up the M1 to Northampton for a post-work pint in The Optimist. That's the pub you believe may well have housed that coin-op arcade. Well, I suddenly realised it's the pub that was The Goose On Two Streets a decade or two ago. It could well have been that arcade, I'm not totally certain, but the size of it and the ceiling, it seems just about right. A lot has changed, obviously.

[Redgatemodels]

My journey with computers stated at Christmas 1981 when after begging my parents and doing a deal with my sister a ZX81 became a joint present under the tree. Still don't know how I swung that one as it sat in my bedroom with very little access granted to my sister lol.

My interest wad piqued by my physics master, who had already got me into electronics with a schools subscription to Everyday Electronics.

He had bought a ZX80 and the school had just got got an RML380Z locked away in a store room off the library. Yes, just one computer for the whole school!

At this point earlier distractions such as Lego, scalextic and model railways were put aside. I did return to trains when my first Son was born and I am now a fairly regular contributor to BRM Magazine amongst other things.

[Joefish]

I can't remember which came first exactly, but we did have a Grandstand Colour TV Game, which was the usual switchable variants of Pong, two twist controllers, and a lightgun with an extended barrel (but no shoulder stock).

Before that, it was all about LEGO. The classic Space sets with blue and grey ships with yellow windows; red, white, then yellow and black uniformed spacemen. And later Technic LEGO, anything yellow, starting with the original Bulldozer, then Fork-Lift truck, and spares and a motor kit. Or a mix of Hornby and Lima trains on a double-loop layout shared with my brother. On summer holidays in the caravan, stuck inside when it rained, it was all about a small box under the side seat full of Matchbox Mobile Action Command, and later the cloned Action Jack, miniature action figures and vehicles. The fads for Star Wars or even Action Force figures were out of my price range, so surplus Action Jacks were often subject to crude customisations or issued with vehicles made from packaging card and copious amounts of sellotape.

My parents didn't have a lot of cash - my Dad was a teacher, and my Mum had quit teaching to raise us kids. Made a little money from helping at the local playgroup while my elder brother and I were pre-school, and some from catalogue resales. But we did OK at Christmas, and they'd both taught us to read well as infants, having the full set of Ladybird primary reading books at home. And then my Dad was eager for us to learn about computers. He was a secondary school science teacher, and during summer holidays he'd borrow the school's computers. First an RM 380Z, then a ZX81.

Then it came to Christmas and a computer of our own was discussed. In the low price-range, the Enterprise Elan looked impressive, but evidently was going to be delayed whereas the Speccy was already out. In the end, the 48K Speccy we ordered from Boots was late and we had another borrowed school one over Christmas. I had 3D Space Wars and my brother had Psion Flight Simulator. That must have been the end of 1983, so I'd have been 10. And with that we started meddling with BASIC, copying games at school, and joysticks came the following Christmas.

[flange]

@PeteProdge

Just a footnote to say what a marvellous thread this is along the others of a similar vein and It's been fascinating to read everyone's stories of their lives pre/post ownership of Mr Sinclair's marvellous black boxes and has really brightened up my week.

@Joefish You had the colour Grandstand jobby? Posh sod! I could only afford the B/W one!

[SusanW]

My school acquired a Commodore PET in 1979 and somebody showed me how to write little BASIC programs. So I started writing little games and toys. I remember the excitement and mystery about discovering things like INKEY$, which let you read the keyboard without pausing for input, so suddenly I could write interactive games. We had no docs or manuals that I knew of, so all the functionality was revealed through rumour and hearsay. Also there were things called "Poke codes" which could make the machine do weird things, and although I understood that they were about writing to memory, there didn't seem to be any logic to what you could do with them.

One day somebody bought in a game - "3D Star Trek" - and it was SO FAST! It drew a starfield that moved in real time, and someone said it was written in "machine code". Woooooow! I'd never heard of that before, but it was clearly deep magic. The maths teacher didn't know much about it, but he said I'd need to get a book on 6502, which I remember sounding so bizarre, like, would there be books on everything from 1 to 6501?

So I jumped on a train into London, went to Foyles, and found their computer section, and hot damn there was a book on 6502 Machine Code, and here it still is, all held together with tape.

I started reading it, and learned what it told me, but I had absolutely no context for where you actually started. It was all assembler mnemonics, and I knew you couldn't just type them in to the PET. And there was one big page - this one:

which I really didn't understand and sort of ignored - it was the 6502 opcode table. And then, rummaging through the school computer room, I found the PET manual, and it had a little section on its machine code monitor mode, and suddenly it all made sense! I had to write a program in Assembly language, convert it to hex using the hitherto mysterious opcode page, and then enter it in this monitor, and then, the magic would flow - and it did! And then that tied into what poke codes were, and all the lights went on. So then I was hand-assembling short programs to make the display flash quickly, and it was like octarine fire.

In 1981, my Dad bought me a ZX81, and I wrote lots of little games and a little Z80 code. Then in April '82 I heard about the Spectrum and went to the Practical Computer Exhibition at Earl's Court where it was being launched, determined that it was good, and went back the next day with the money to put an order in right there. A week later, I was returning from a Duke of Edinburgh expedition in Wales, and saw the Battlezone machine in a service station, and the rest is history. I didn't actually receive a working Spectrum until the September, which I think wasn't uncommon.

Oh, yes - what about non-computer stuff? I used to spend my time making these:

so now I think about it, I've always gone for the whole vertex/edge/3d thing. Hmm.

[arjun]

Interesting thread!

Before the speccy years: Since dad was in the Indian army, we were posted to various places every three years, which meant I made new friends and lost old friends every three years. I had a normal childhood otherwise living mostly in "defence colonies", which sounds like a military preparation for an upcoming war but was really housing societies where defence personnel and their families lived together. Every afternoon kids from the colony would meet up after school and hang out and play cricket (sometimes with just 2 people with invented rules), or cycle through the neighbourhood or play silly games with balls or stones or chalks. Fairly outdoorsy stuff. Life went on like this until I turned 7 when we acquired a color tv in 1984, a phenomenon that just starting off in India and still out of the reach of many Indians. It was out of the reach of even my dad who earned a relatively decent salary as an officer in the Army and the TV was bought with some loan from my uncle who was visiting us in Kashmir, on the insistence of the said uncle who said it was a thing of marvel. And it was! Spiderman became my new best friend, hanging out with me every Saturday evening along with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Cut to 1988, Chennai (then Madras). My dad came home one day with a big smile on his face and a colorful brochure promising a new future that belonged to a home computer called the dB Spectrum +(a ZX Spectrum clone manufactured in India under license from Sinclair). I had no idea what a computer was or what it could do, but I had played some games like Snoopy Tennis on the Game Set & Watch and seen some ads about Atari games in Archie's comics (remember those?) and was intrigued by them.

But this Spectrum+ looked very interesting indeed. It could play games, do barcharts and graphs (huh?), help with homework (hmm...), and do something called word processing (boring!). You could even "program" it do whatever you wanted it to! Now that bit really had me intrigued.

My dad had gone ahead and placed an order for from the local computer shop called Computer Point, which I'd never set foot in before. It would take 3 more months before it would be delivered but I was totally sold at this point to the promise that the future was about to change. And it did! Three months later we excitedly made our way to pick up the computer from the shop. The place was fascinating! There was a strange buzz of Olivetti PC's and other clones in the shop with business type peopl typing on keyboards and staring at amber or green coloured monitors. But in one corner of the shop there were a couple of color TVs with strange graphics and a beautifully sleek black machine no bigger than a shoebox making happy beeps. One kid was playing Enduro Racer while the other TV was showing off Starion. To the 11 year old me, this was heaven. I couldn't wait to get back home and start my own computing journey. We raced back home after picking up a couple of books (I don't remember which) as well as a couple of games (Psion Chess and Chequered Flag I think).

After setting it up and working out how to load tapes we played a few rounds of Chess where we roundly got beaten by the computer even at level 1! Then dad decided to type in a BASIC program from the manual to show me how I could get the computer to do whatever I wanted (as promised). After the first couple of listings and showing me how to work the keyboard, he challenged me to modify the BASIC listing for the Stars and Striped program (ZX Spectrum+ User Guide) to draw the Indian flag instead. And that set me off on the quest to learn programming, which I still do to this very day. What a journey it has been!

A couple of years later I discovered a couple of kids in my class who also had Spectrums (one guy had a +3 even! Rich bast.). We exchanged reviews, copies of games, ideas for own programs etc, places where we could get games and books for cheap, et al. Heady days!

[MarkRJones1970]

Before I was 14 and got my 1st Spectrum I was into typical boy things that they did in the early 80s. I collected stamps and coins (particularly King George III era), was into Dinosaurs and fossils (me and my cousin wrote regularly to a paelontologist who worked at the Natural History Museum called C.P.Palmer and we were invited down once to see the fossils that weren't on display. I even got 2 letters from David Attenborough which I still have), had a good Action Man collection, had quite a few board games (including Cluedo, Monopoly, Spy Ring, Beware The Spider, Mouse Trap, Connect 4 etc) I read comics (getting the current favourite's annual each Christmas) and went out on my bike lots - just riding around or biked up to my cousins at the weekend. I discovered The Beatles in 1980 aged 10 when I saw 'Help!' on TV on Dec 9th, the day John was murdered, and was working my way through their albums (my Dad had them all up to the White Album) and was starting to dabble in their solo work.

By the time I got my Spectrum I'd lost interest in getting more stamps, coins (which I kept and still have) and board games. My Action Man collection had gone off to a jumble sale. I still went out on my bike though. My Spectrum didn't stop me from playing outside, going swimming outdoors in the summer and biking over to the park or playing out in the street after tea. I'd still bike up to my couin's house at the weekend - but it wasn't to talk about Dinosaurs, he now also had a Spectrum (after having a ZX-81 - which was interesting at the time but didn't inspire me to get my own). So I'd be up there and we'd be tape-to-taping each others new acquisitions from that week.