When I was a lad the home computer was just coming on to the market. Yes - I am one of the sad people that remember the Sinclair ZX80 and Sinclair ZX81. The latter I even tried to write a program for but due to the minute amount of memory (0.5KB) you were limited to about 15 lines of basic before the 'memory full' error message came on to the screen. Not that any game on this computer would be that visually exciting due to the only colours employed were black and white. But this was just the beginning and it wasn't long before a flood of other home computers came on to the market. I pleaded and pleaded with my parents until they finally relented and used their 'Access' credit card to buy me a 16K Sinclair ZX Spectrum for £99 (they couldn't afford £129 for the 48K version). Imagine my excitement unwrapping this marvellous piece of technology on my 13th birthday. Up until then I had been writing programs in BASIC programming language on the HONEYWELL computer at school (kindly donated by a local firm who had no further use for it). The school's computer had probably less computing power than a modern mobile phone but took up the space the size of 2 classrooms. The mainframe took about 10 minutes to boot up and this involved a procedure where punched cards were fed through a card reader to get the thing started up. Once started it would take a further 10 minuted to respond to each instruction. Luckily the fantastic ZX Spectrum kicked the poo out of it. Oh yes - the ZX Spectrum with its choice of approximately 8 colours, its keyboard that was likened to the feel of 'dead flesh' and its wonderful sound technology that could be no better described than as a series of beeps was the most fantastic invention since the VCR. Of course, a lot of kids at school were jumping on the Spectrum bandwagon but equally as many were plumping for its main rival the Commodore 64. Many a lunchtime was spent arguing the pros and cons of each computer over a corned beef sandwich and a bag of crisps. The Spectrum was easy to write programs for and came with a handy guide to BASIC programming and a 12 month guarantee.This came in handy when I dropped mine accidentally on purpose after 11 1/2 months and Sir Clive was gracious enough to send me a replacement. I even used my Spectrum to write programs for my Computer Studies 'O' level. As I remember these programs included a simple 'hangman' game with a succession of wrong answers resulting in a liittle stick man being hanged on screen and a small french vocabulary test based on about 3 verbs. Printouts were done on the Spectrum dedicated thermal printer which used silver thermal printer paper that looked like the silver cigarette wrapping found inside cigarette boxes and reacted to heat to turn black. If you had a large document to print the printer would start to overheat and cause a fairly nasty burning smell! Due to the large demand for the Spectrum and other similar home computers a fairly decent number of software houses sprang up to satisfy the demand for all of the school kids who wanted to see what their new computer would do. One that stands out for me is Ultimate Play The Games who produced classic games like 'Jetpac', 'Manic Miner', 'Transam' and 'Jet Set Willy'. Many a night I spent trying long hours to defeat the 20 levels of ' Manic Miner'. Spurred on by the rumour going round school that completion of the 20th and final level would be rewarded with a code that could be redeemed for a cash prize I was not going to give up until I completed the course. In the end I resorted to cheating and used the 'infinite lives' code which from memory was something like 6031769. I could be mistaken as we are talking about something that happened over 20 years ago but I have a funny feeling that it is the correct code. Sad eh? The limitations of memory on home computers in the early 80's meant that games had to be fairly simple in terms of graphics because the programmers probably only had 48 - 64k of memory at most to play with. This resulted in games that although visually simple and lacking in deph of colours had fantastically addictive gameplay. Even my dad would beg me for a turn on the computer to play 'Space Raiders' - the Spectrum version of Space Invaders. The whole family took it in turns to play the computer and try out all the new games. There was a fairly vibrant market in copied games at the time as all games were on a cassette tape and could be easily copied from one tape to another. My final collection included almost 1000 games and I could honestly say that I played and knew how to play every single one of them. Now I am approaching the grand old age of 40 I have my own children. I have a 7 year old and a 5 year old and they are both massive fans of the Playstation 2 and games on the PC. Occasionally they ask me to help when they are stuck on a particular part of a game. They might as well ask me to decipher a coded Russian message because I am absolutely lost when the number of keys and gamepad combinations outweighs the number of fingers on both hands. You see, in my day it was nearly always 'Z' for left, 'X' for right and 'SPACE BAR' to fire. Now I think that you probably need a university degree to play most modern games. Yes - give me the good old Asteroids, Frogger and Bomber anyday. You can keep your new fangled all singing all dancing latest games. I'm happy with the 2 dimensional 2 coloured sprite that simply responds to the direction of the cursor key I am pressing and thanks to the internet there are many sites where I can wallow in my nostalgia and play these games for free. Only thing missing is the screeching noise from the tape player and the 15 minute wait to load the game. If you are under the age of 25 and have no idea about the sort of games I am talking about have a look at www.Freegames.sc to see for yourself.

1090