Those golden days
Pete over at CodeHappy has been getting all nostalgic recently because it’s 25 years since the Commodore 64 was launched on the world. Reading his post got me thinking about my forays into the world of computing.
The first computer I ever used - and then the first computer I ever owned - was the Sinclair ZX81. A massive 1KB of memory, a ridiculously low resolution (was it 32 x 32? Something silly like that), a ‘keyboard’ that you really had to fight with and, of course, Sinclair Basic. And it was wonderful.
Magazines like Sinclair User and Sinclair Programs used to publish listings of code that you could program into your machine and play (they were usually games). You couldn’t save them unless you also had a tape machine connected to the ZX but that didn’t matter - you were a programmer. And back then we all were; if you wanted the machine to do anything you had to program it. If, like Pete, you knew what you were doing you programmed in machine code but the rest of us just used Basic and - by continually not working as it should have done - it taught us to be structured and lean with our code.
You could, if you were one of the monied generation, buy an expansion pack that gave you a whopping 16KB of memory. The two most popular ones came from Sinclair and Panda. The Panda, as well as being slightly cheaper, was slightly curvier (”shaped to the contours of your ZX81″) but that made it no more stable; all the bashing that you had to do on that keyboard often made the expansion pack move and break its connection to the machine - instant re-set and the loss of the last two hours programming.
Then came the launch of the ZX Spectrum, and this was a major advance in computing power. Colour, sound, higher resolution (up into the 100’s now I think) and ‘proper’ rubber keys, with a choice of 16KB and a massive 48KB memory. Gaming started to really become possible with graphical adventure games like Atic Atac, Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy appearing from companies like Imagine and Ultimate Play The Game (who hailed from the exotic sounding Ashby de la Zouch).
It was around this time that Pete’s beloved Commodore 64 appeared on the scene and gave all us Sinclair users a bit of a shock; it had a proper keyboard, it had better colour, better resolution and better sound. Not that we were prepared to admit that, though, and so began the sort of war that is played out today between Mac and PC users - but for us it was fought in the school playground and was much more brutal!
Sinclair tried to respond with the Spectrum Plus (almost a real keyboard) and add-ons like the Micro Drive and updates to their awful thermal printer; they even launched the QL, which was supposed to be a business machine but which was always demonstrated with a 3D chess game. None of it worked; Commodore - with the 64 in homes and the PET in schools - had Sinclair beaten hands down. Eventually Sir Clive sold out to Alan Sugar at Amstrad but it wasn’t long after that that the Sinclair name disappeared altogether from the computing world.
But I still fondly remember those heady days of being on the cutting-edge of affordable personal computing with the ZX range (80, 81 and Spectrum), the Commodore’s, TRS-80’s, VIC-20’s and Oracles with their array of languages - Sinclair Basic, Commodore Basic, Cobol, Pascal and Fortran. And properly written programs.
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