Reflections
Time is a cruel taskmaster. Looking back on all those days and months studiously staring at tiny TV screens crammed with fuzzy text, learning to program, it's easy to forget just how much time and effort was expended and how quickly those days fade into obscurity and finally oblivion. Yet many things still remain; the fun, discovery, triumph, and indeed dispair at the occasional Appocalypse Bug. I've always tried to keep track of all the things I and friends have done in the past, taking great pains to avoid losing all those memories. Until now I've kept these archives safe and hidden, migrating them from one storage format to another as times have changed, but I reviewed some of these archives recently I thought it might be fun to document some of it online for posterity and anyone else who may find old computer curiousities interesting.
Of course 'old' to me is the eighties and early nineties, hardly the era of valves and punch cards which many would consider historical as computer history, but in many ways I think the eighties era is the most historically interesting, giving birth to our modern world of PCs and the internet. The real heros of this time are well known to history, but there are countless other more obscure souls who grew up then but were never in the right place at the right time to make it big. They all still shared in the excitement and contributed in their own small way to the magic.
(Note that the eras below show the computer that I was primarily using during those years. The computers themselves may have existed long before, and after, the years given)
| Sinclair Spectrum Era 1987 - 1990 |  Image by Bill Bertram |
My particular story begins some time in 1987, when the Sinclair 48k Spectrum, affectionately known as the 'Rubber Doormat', and its descendants were taking the world by storm. Primitive, with poor graphics and a hideous RSI inducing keyboard, it was a fantastic machine for kids to learn about computers. Using it and other similar machines (like the Commordore 64), a generation of the world's best engineers taught themselves their future trade in their bedrooms. Bought on a curious and rather expensive whim, my family's Spectrum sat forlorn for some years in the corner of the dining room until one fateful day in 1987, for a reason I cannot recall, I chose to read through the orange covered technical manual, then still pristine with all its pages still retained in the awkward spiral binding, wondering what the table of mysterious mnemonics were in the appendix. From that day forth, for good or ill, my destiny was set. I still have boxes of tape cassettes packed full of Spectrum BASIC and Machine code software developed back then, much of it dreadfully bad and banale, arising from the mentality of a child, so I will not exhibit any of it here...;) Surfice to say, I still have that orange covered technical manual; dogeared, motheaten with pages adrift. An evocative and cherished momento. |
