On Christmas day 1981 I awoke with the usual excitement of any 9 year old boy. I clearly remember going downstairs and being told not to go into the lounge because my Dad was busy setting up my main Christmas present. In those days we’d get a main present and some other smaller presents. My parents weren’t well off, we lived in a typical 3 bedroom semi in Southern England and got by as best we could.
After breakfast in the kitchen we were eventually allowed to go into the lounge to open some presents. What greeted me was the device that propelled me into the world of computing. My parents has bought me a Sinclair ZX81.
The reason we weren’t allowed into the lounge was because my Dad had got up early to go and set it up, connecting it to the family TV. He spent most of the early morning typing in some code from a manual or magazine (I forget which) so I’d have something to play with right away.
I remember with great fondness spending much of the day, and following year playing with my very first computer. I would avidly buy magazines and type in the listings. I’d borrow books from my local library and interpret the TRS-80 or other generic BASIC programs into something my little ZX81 could do.
The family got sick of me monopolising the main TV in the house, and eventually got hold of an old one for me to use in the kitchen. I spent much of my pre-teen years sat on a stool in the kitchen about 3 inches from a 23″ TV on the kitchen breakfast bar, with my ZX81 on a shelf below. My brother and sister would have friends round and I was pretty much always there, typing in some code or trying to get something to load from a tape cassette. Such happy days.
I’d frequently be amazed at the raw computing power in my hands. One day I had to go to my Dads work because school was closed. I took my ZX81 with me and wrote a dating application. It stored vital details about individuals in a database and could find your perfect mate based on a simple questionnaire I typed up on an electronic typewriter in my Dads office. He passed it round the people in the office, getting them to fill it in and I processed the results, telling them who matched who. It felt like the office workers were amazed at my computing prowess, but secretly they probably fixed their answers to make my code look good.
A while later I outgrew the ZX81 and its wobbly 16K RAM-pack and lusted after more powerful devices. We were not well off so I couldn’t afford the next generation device, the Sinclair Spectrum, but I saw one for sale, second hand, in a record shop nearby. I begged and pleaded with my Mum to get it for me, and eventually she got the funds together to buy it for me. It was the best £20 I’ve ever begged her to spend!
It was a 16K Spectrum with a rubber keyboard, all packaged in the original polystyrene box with a cardboard sleeve. There was an orange covered manual, power supply, cables and that was about it.
There was also one cassette that came in the box, labelled “Horizons”. It contained some demonstrations of what the Spectrum could do, a couple of simple games and a version of Conways Game of Life. That tape got a lot of use until I saved up enough to buy some ‘real’ games.
The nearest town to where I grew up had very few stores where you could buy games. Martins the Newsagent in Farnborough had a decent enough collection of software. I would go in religiously on a Saturday to see what new titles were available, pocket money in hand to splurge on the latest £1.99 or £2.99 tapes.
There’s a fairly small number of games compatible with the 16K Spectrum and I probably owned most of them. Many an hour was spent on Ultimate’s titles like Cookie, Trans-Am and Pssst! One day I bought Ant Attack and was dismayed to discover it was a 48K title, so wouldn’t even load on my lowly 16K speccy.
I saw an advert in Sinclair User magazine for a RAM upgrade kit from an outfit called Video Vault. The 16K spectrum had a bunch of slots into which more RAM could be inserted to bring it up to the full compliment of 48K. I saved up the cash to buy the RAM, and sent it off. I think it cost me £30 which was a fair amount for a 11 year old kid with a sweets and games habit
I remember clearly reading and re-reading the cassette liner for Ant Attack, day after day until the memory finally arrived. Once installed I spent many a happy day playing my new 48K titles and expanded my game collection to occupy most of the spare storage space in the kitchen!
Eventually I moved on from the Spectrum 48K to a 128K +2 then later an Amstrad CPC 464 which I sold to buy my first PC, an Epson 8086. Since then I’ve owned more computers than I dare to think about, all growing in size, speed, capacity and capability with each iteration.
It’s been a great 30 years with computers in my life, and I can only imagine what the next 30 years will be like. Thanks Dad for setting me on this road, and thanks too to Sir Clive Sinclair for designing the first computer I ever owned.
16 Comments
I’m about the same age, and have about the same story. But, over here it was Commodore’s and TRS80′s. I got a Commodore Vic 20 for X-mas in the early 80′s. It set me on a path for life!
I miss the good old days.
Great story, brings back a lot of memories. I started on a Commodore 16k and later moved to the Speccy 48k and onto PCs. Hours of endless fun as a child typing in code to make a dot move around the screen or playing games like Football Director and Dizzy. Happy days!
Typing in code from magazines is a lost skill. Hours spent pouring over the poorly printed listings trying to find where you missed a comma or quote mark
I’m typing in straight from books still now even though I can download the code from a server. I believe I learn more from typing it in as I digest it and analyse the syntax as I’m typing line by line, command and variables being closely scrutinized. I still have to compare my attempts with the downloaded code though to fix the typos that I miss.
Nice story. Reminds me of my own first computer, a Z80 based I.C.E Felix. Only that my parents didn’t set it up. Actually they had no clue what computers were and what they could do. So you can imagine my moms horror when I flipped it on and was presented with a blank screen and a cursor. After all it was her “idea to buy the damn thing”.
I’d not heard of the I.C.E. Felix till now. I love how pretty much all the Spectrum clones looked better / more professional, and came with half decent keyboards!
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=632
What a coincidence, I got one the exact same day
Mine was connected to an old black & white portable TV. I remember me (and my friends) wondering why the picture wasn’t black/cyan like in one of the adverts!
I don’t remember who discovered it but sound would come through the TV speaker (if you turned the TV sound right up) when the display flashed. I managed to make it sound exactly like the Trim Phone we had in the hallway – much fun had there!!
I went to my mums house recently and she offloaded some stuff which I kept in her loft. Amongst it was a black and white telly, which is still in the boot of my car
Wow, you have a better memory than me! But I do remember rushing up to my bedroom with ZX81 in hand, plugging it all in and then at the prompt typing “hello”. I was very disappointed that the computer seemed to have no ability to talk back! But once I got passed that disappointment, I fell in love with the thing. I didn’t do much programming on it, but I used to get the computer magazines and type in the assembly code in order to play games. There was an awesome dinosaur game I remember.
I was fortunate enough to be able to have the Spectrum when it came out and was blown away by how much better it was than the ZX81. I remember the games with such fondness, but sadly many of them are still available on the net – and they’re actually a bit crap – but at the time they seemed absolutely incredible. I spent many a happy hour with Jetpack. But the main memory I have is anxiously waiting whilst the games retrieved from the audio cassettes – would it load? Can you imagine a storage technology that was so slow and only worked 2 in every 3 times – laughable really.
I went to a party once as a teen where someone pulled out an old Dragon 32 and put it in an oven – sacrosanct!
Nice story,
Brings me memory of my Christmas day in 1981, just about an hour later than you (Italy is gmt+1) I was unpacking my first home computer, a TI 99/4A (the slowest 16bit computer in the history of technology).
A great period when technology was available for all.
My first computer was an Acorn Electron which I got in ’85 which I had to use with a B & W TV until I got a colour TV for Christmas on year. Used to type in the programs from both Micro User and Electron User. After I’d upgraded it as much as was possible – 5.25″ floppy drive etc. I bought myself an Acorn A3010 in ’92 which came with 1MB of RAM.
We got our first in 1984 – a BBC Micro Model B (the same as our the primary schools were getting). I absolutely loved it – typing in code from magazines, messing around with it to see what broke and what changed if you did XYZ. Even discovered that you could get more data onto the cassettes if you changed the playback speed – it would cope with something like a 15% speed increase and the programmes would still load flawlessly!
I kept that thing going long past its use-by-date – my older brother had bought himself a 386-SX-25 and when I wasn’t playing on that I would still mess around on the ol’ BBC. Eventually I got myself a “PC” as well, which kick-started a long line of more “PC”s after it. The BBC, a whole heap of games and apps on tape, a big ol’ daisy wheel printer and a 300-baud modem all sit quietly in a series of boxes at my Mum’s house.
That brings back memories. Across the pond, my mom was at a party and my mom asked someone what kind of computer she could get for me and he said the timex-sinclair 1000 in 1983. It was my first ‘real’ computer, costing 100 USD. I later got the 16kb expansion pack — that lead to a lot of cursing
One tap in the wrong place and BAMN, your hand-typed program that took 30 mins to type was history. Afterwards I found out about the timex-sinclair 2068 and saved money to get that. It had a few flaws that were never fixed but it was a step-up from the 1000. I also got the joystick and the modem. I used the modem and a terminal program in college to connect to a mainframe (CDC 6000). oh the wonders of 1200 baud.
You have touch me with this post.
I’ve flashed back to my early infant days that were alike yours.
Thanks for this time spent reading…
Wow, nostalgia strikes!
I started on a CPC-464 back in ’89. It had a dodgy tape drive, so we had the 3″ disk attachment which had this monstrously huge edge connector that went into the back of the computer.
I was about 5 at the time, but I was instantly obsessed with typing things in from the 1000+ page manual it came with, over time I started seeing what happened if I typed things in differently to how they were in the book, how I could chain these snippets together and make it do new things. I wonder if any of those 3″ disks are still around with the stuff I wrote back then?
Thanks for sharing this.
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