I was kinda lucky to have access to allot of computers as my father ran a business and after hours i got access to his computers at his premises, and used allot of early stuff, as he seemed to buy computers, just on the basis, that he liked a particular model and indulged in it, as an interest whether you actually got value out of the machines / investment was less of interest in those days, it was all just so new and exciting, people bought computers just for the excitement of exploring what they could do, its a long list but here goes with some of my favourites :

The first computer I laid hands on ? was the Apple II with two external 5.25″ disk II floppy disk drives sitting under a green screen monitor – no colours except green. not sure if that was just not being able to afford the luxury of a colour screen at the graphics i believe were 4 bit by some jiggery pokery with some rules as to what colour/tones could be next to each other on screen.

I played space invaders on it, which was a mean and almost perfect conversion from the arcade version I had pumped many 10 pences into.

I tried out all the various software. Of which there were some pretty funky demos, including one with an interactive room, which was pretty cool, that could have been an early hypercard demo maybe ? I don’t think it was “mystery house” as it was more bitmap graphics than vectors, a picture that winked at you, things in the room that did things, but certainly cant find any reference to it on the web. Perhaps a little too early at that stage although i didnt know what software was used to build that room demo. Although I did think it was highly original at the time and not many other computers had done anything like it.

After that, I got my hands on the first portable computer – the Osborne 1 Luggable :

For those days the size of a family suitcase was considered portable, it didnt have allot of software, but it run cpm and came with mbasic which you could then use to run colossal cave adventure – from, man I got a kick out of that game late night with that little vector green screen, I can never explain what a revelation it was, to play that game, xyzzy, plugh are the magic words, and dont forget to get the lamp, the items stick in my memory, the egg the bird, the cage the rusty wand, and getting lost the the maze “You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike” the pirate stealing things, it was all fantastic. you painted the pictures in your own imagination, a cup of coffee and few custard creams and I was off on an adventure – for hours, a revelation and in those does a relatively small scene of people, the UK in those early 80’s days was leading the world in home grown – home computing, as america was still mainyl atari and nintendo players, now were just a backwater of the tech industry. I blame thatcher being from an era that couldn’t the full importance of sustaining the industry through a collapse period.

After those two memorable and seminal machines there were many others a pdp 11, Apricot’s, xen’s, viglen’s, almarcs, sirius’s, husky portable’s, IBM’s, I remember using the GEM operating system which was my first experience of a gui and wimp environment and using gem paint, to paint my first artistic pictures on a computer, all simple blue and black silhouettes with moonlight, if i’d have left school at the tender age of 11, I would have been an early ZX81 game developer, probably no smarter move could have been made. writing in my bedroom and replicating tapes on home made duplicators and selling far and wide by post. Theres a good documentary on this era coming called “from bedrooms to billions” hopefully this documentary going to capture this unrecorded era of early UK computer history.

My father also was probably the first man in hampshire to buy an original apple laserwriter, I remember switching toner cartridges for metallic effect ones etc, interesting stuff.

The first laser printer publicly avallable for personal use in the UK

Also the first I’d heard of to have a Hi-res Hercules graphics card for desktop publishing (720×348 in 1bit) way ahead the word DTP reaching the public consciousness.

Hercules graphics adapter

with the first version of ventura publisher:

and a winchester drive 30mb in size ? I think it was called a winchester because it was the equivalent of two of the biggest drives at the time and was therefore double, like a double barrel winchester rifle, although maybe i’ve misunderstood this. A few duller ones too the amstrad PC1512 pc clones struck me as particularly meagre ham fisted machines, compared to their genius CPC brethren, Though the PCW’s were probably the most purchased and functionally used business machines of those times to enhance productivity in actual businesses in the UK.

a computer of my own (well to share with my brother :] )

Upto this point id been using the machines in my dads business, rather than having my own machine, at about the age of 12, the parents clubbed together a feat considering they broke up before I was 1, way back when. And at considerable expense bought me and my brother a ZX81 to share for christmas, crikey a computer of my own ;).

with cassette tapecorder, and ran it off an old B/W television. We laboriously typed in games from listings in magazines and loaded a few cassette games into it, only having 1k of Ram meant you had to be totally ingenious to write games for it, as in the 1K of ram could only store about 10 long lines of code before the memory ran out, none the less I learned to write in basic on that machine, and to be honest never have I seen before or after, a more suitable machine for anyone to learn basic coding on- as one … theres was nothing else to do and two the restraint of 10 lines only, kept the coding short and haiku like, switch on and away you type, no distractions or anything. there wasn’t at that time much else to do on computers then, except to code, whereas today less people learn to code because computers have so many other inumerate distractions built in. Never bought the ram expansion for it the machine even at £99.00 was only just affordable by a familys in the UK in those days, hacking hardware to make the most of it, existed even then, for instance one of them frigged sound on a machine with no sound, by making you turn the volume on the television to maximum, they worked out how you could modulate the interference noise sent to the television from the natural hum of the internal circuitry to create an actual tune without a sound chip anywhere in the machine !

games on the ZX81 :

a 3D maze game on the ZX81 the grandaddy of 1st person perspective and the FPS games to come:

The precursor of elite > “trader” a 16k game i could only dream of running in my wildest fantasys :

The keyboard was as most remember a legendary pain to use, but hey Sinclair did make computers personal and affordable, without sinclair there would be no personal / home computer industry in the UK, and to think we once had a silicon valley in the UK, and now we have nought, quite sad really.

they even managed to hack high res graphics onto a ZX81, so the 16k games looked more like spectrum games.

My next machine was a total revelation the only good thing Alan Michael Sugar ever helped bring to creation – in my opinion (unless you consider crass entertainment like the apprentice, interesting), the cpc series is what I will only ever remember him for, as specification wise it was a stroke of genius, the best machine his company ever made the Amstrad CPC6128 :

This machine was like moving into modern day computing in comparison to the ZX81, amazing colour – amazing sound, a disk drive, the machine was far superior to its nearest competition, but the machine was expensive, I knew I was very lucky in getting one i suppose my endeavours on the Sinclair were deemed worth encouraging. It had an amazing paint program OCP art studio, the games were amazing it had many graphics modes one even running in 640×200 with 2 colours ? would have been considered hi-def by those days standards, the quality of the games were amazing, later platforms did not have such good games it must have been quite good to program games on, Gauntlet was amazingly close to the arcade version, Zombie by UBI-soft amazing (Amazing intro screen and music blew me away). one of UBI-softs first games ? if not their first ?

Cauldron had fantastic music and was a great if tough game :

As you can see by the following video almost every game genre played today in just an uprated form, was well established on these early platforms at this time, apart from god sims (actually even little computer person could be considered the precursor of the sims).

Even 3d games such as doom were represented by maze games and elite etc. As a gaming and basic learning computer it had it all.

I also played my first mmo on this computer via my first modem circa 1986-1988 ! 23 years ago ! I think it was 300baud and you used connect to micronet
which was run by prestel part created on post office premises and run by BT which i think was a BBS a bulletin board system, and from that you could telnet ? to “shades” mud

this was a truly stunning experience for the day, so few had been online at that time let alone played in an online game ! it was basically a Multi user text based adventure game where you could see other peoples action and chat. And was the first time I saw online griefing from a character ?(so long ago its almost madness) Each character had a name, and there was this one user who was called Reepicheep aka that mouse from narnia, anyway he used to find a place where people were congregating to go into a castle etc and he used to make allot of futile chat and fill the screen with rubbish, in this game you could kick another character and it would show that action to other users, so everyone took turn to give Reepicheep a liitle kick so the screen instead was full “xxxxx kicks Reepicheep hard” etc to stop him from blathering and filling screens with useless text, eventually he got the message, I got the feeling he was just to excited at being in an online game.

believe or not some genius has ressurected this game in java form presumably no extra players though ?

you can play Shades here

I also had access to an atari 800xl with 1050 disk drive, which i still have lots of disks for:

atari 800xl

at around this point though it wasnt my own machine, my fathers favourite game on this machine was “Journey to the planets”

People attempting to Map Neuron patterns