by Steve Stack
Back then it was the ZX Spectrum, Vic 20, and BBC Micro, and we lost hours trying to guide a miner through a series of caves, taking a bloke called Horace skiing, and typing out ‘PICK UP SWORD’ and ‘GO EAST’ on text adventure games.
But here’s the thing, we would never have had the former without the latter, no matter how quaint and antiquated they may seem today.
Here is a quick whistle-stop tour through some of the more iconic home computers of the time.
Sinclair ZX81
The first home computer that you could purchase from the high street, the ZX81, was the brainchild of calculator king Clive Sinclair, and, launched in 1981, sold over a million units. There were computers available for home use before, most notable its predecessor the ZX80, but they all came in kit form and had to be soldered together. The modern, sleek ZX81 came pre-assembled and pretty much ready to go.
Weighing in with a whopping 1KB of memory (check the size of the next email you send and compare), it had no moving parts and relied on a membrane keyboard (you just pressed hard on the plastic shell) and plugged straight into your television. You could expand the memory with a RAM pack that slotted into the back, cranking power up to 16KB (again, check that against the size of one email today) but the pack was top-heavy and often had to be stuck to the main computer with sticky tape. There was also a printer, a small device that appeared to use that shiny toilet roll they used to have at primary school.
Of course, the greatest achievement of all the 1980s home computers was that they brought gaming into the home and, even though they seem prehistoric by today’s standards, ZX81 games such as Flight Simulator and 3-D Monster Maze have now achieved legendary status.
Sinclair ZX Spectrum
The follow-up to the ZX81 came out a year later, and boasted colour graphics rather than the monochrome of its elder sibling. It was the home computer that truly revolutionised the industry, selling over 5 million units in its various guises, and launching some of the most popular computer games ever.
It was an odd beast, though, and not the most practical of machines. The rubber keys on the keyboard contained multi-functions that could only be accessed by pressing SHIFT or ALT or other more elaborate combinations, and I am pretty sure there are some functions that have still never been used to this day. The rubber keys also made it a bit of a pain to type on, so it lost out in the home programming stakes to its more robust competitors. However, most users only ever pressed Z to move left, X to move right, W to go up, and S to go down, anyway. Sinclair finally relented and included a more traditional keyboard on later models, but the rubber keys remain the distinctive feature of the Spectrum.
Although the early models came with no joystick ports, the Spectrum was a popular gaming machine and spawned numerous classics such as Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Horace Goes Skiing, The Hobbit, Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, and Lords of Midnight. It is credited with inspiring a generation of gamers who went on to create the classics of the 1990s and 2000s.
Commodore Vic 20
Despite the fact that it had lower memory than its competitors (3.5KB compared to the Spectrum’s 16KB), the Vic 20 became the first home computer to sell a million copies, and was one of the most successful machines in both the US and the UK.
Part of the appeal was just the look and feel of the thing. Unlike the Sinclair models, this actually had a proper keyboard, and was large and impressive. You could touch type on it, which made it easier for home programming, and it was a robust piece of kit.
It could never quite live up to the Spectrum’s game play but it did its best to hold its own, and games such as The Wizard and the Princess and Wacky Waiters became classics of the format.
It only lasted a couple of years, though, as the Commodore 64 that followed was much more powerful, and had better graphics. Nonetheless, the Vic 20 was the first computer for many people still in the industry today and is much cherished by those who owned one back then.
Commodore 64
Bigger, more powerful, and in a darker shade of beige, the Commodore 64 became the bestselling home computer of all time, with nearly 17 million machines sold. A big hit in the US, where most of its owners were located, it did not perhaps have the cult gaming appeal in the UK that the Spectrum had, but it was a solid, dependable family computer, and the first such machine that many people owned.
BBC Micro
Education, education, education. Designed and manufactured by Acorn Computers, but supported by the BBC as part of their Computer Literacy Project, this was the machine to be found in schools. The BBC branding added a certain credibility to the machine, enabling Middle England to trust this new fangled device and allow it into their homes. When Computer Studies first hit the timetable, initially as an out-of-hours voluntary lesson, it was usually a BBC Micro that pupils learnt on, supported by a range of TV programming.
Never very cool, the BBC Micro was probably doomed by its association with the classroom. Kids wanted a Spectrum or Vic 20 to play on at home. It was also about twice the price of its more fun competitors, so never quite made it into sufficient homes to secure any traction. It remains, however, the machine that many people learnt to program on.
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Loading Computer Games from Tape
Of course, the games for all of the home computers just mentioned were loaded up by playing a cassette tape. Any tape player would do, but those rectangular box machines were the most commonly used. You would connect one to your computer with a cable, type ‘LOAD MANIC MINER’, or whatever the game was called, and then press PLAY.
A series of peculiar beeps, whirs, clicks, and general fuzziness would then be heard as the tape player communicated with the computer. Sometimes, with a bit of luck, the tape would get to the end, and the program would have loaded successfully, but the strike rate wasn’t great. It could take a few attempts to get it right.
There were no short cuts, either. A game could take five minutes or so to load, and you would invariably be looking at the screen waiting for something to happen. No Windows progress bars in those days. And you would have to go through the same process every single time you played the game. None of this download once and then it was on your computer for good. Oh no, if you wanted a quick game of Horace Goes Skiing after school, then you needed to twiddle your thumbs for a while first.
Progress is a wonderful thing. I can download an app to my phone within seconds and it will stay there forever, if I want. One click and I am checking a map, throwing an angry bird at a pig, or reading the latest news headlines. So why am I nostalgic for a time when it would take bloody ages, and usually two or three attempts, to get anything loaded?
I have no idea.
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Printer Paper with Holes
Next time your computer printer jams, runs out of ink, or fails to work wirelessly, cast your mind back to the early days of home computing and the very first computer printers.
Huge dot-matrix blighters, with the most impractical and bizarre paper. Long perforated rolls, rather like a giant’s toilet roll, with holes punched at regular intervals running parallel along each side. You had to feed the holes onto some prongs and then hand-crank the thing along until it was in place, and then wait 20 minutes while a device a bit like Grandstand’s vidiprinter spewed out vaguely readable text.
Compare a printout from a Commodore 64 to the flashy colour stuff we get today. This is all in recent memory, people; we really have come this far.
If you ever had to deal with this stuff, you will never forget it. But I doubt that you miss it.
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Dial-up Modems
With the advent of broadband internet connections and wireless connectivity, one relatively recent technological development is rapidly becoming endangered.
Less than ten years ago, if you had a home internet connection, then it would almost certainly have been dial-up. By which I mean that your computer modem would use your telephone line to call up your
internet provider and connect to the service.
This little box of mysterious flashing lights and wires would let you know it was doing its job by relaying the sounds of the phone call through your computer:
[dial tone]
[sound of a phone ringing]
blleeeep burgh krpphgspreeksplangkerlungkerlungkerlung
[pause]
bleepsping plonk plonkkerchang dank dank ding
[ad lib to fade]
By the end of which you would, six or seven times out of ten, be connected to the internet. But, boy, would it be slow. Dial-up internet connections were typically 56 kilobits per second, which is 12½ times slower than the slowest broadband connection. To put that in perspective, a film that would take you 30 minutes to download via broadband today would have taken over six hours on dial-up.
And then there is the fact that it used your actual phone line. Unless you were savvy enough to have more than one line coming into the house, going online meant nobody else could use the phone. This sparked cries of, ‘Get off the bloody phone, I need to send some emails!’ or ‘Get off the bloody internet, I need to call my mother!’
So it is a good thing that we have moved on. It really is. But those of us who heard them shall never forget those squeally plinky plonky noises.
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BASIC
BASIC (the acronym stood for ‘Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code’) was the most common and popular computer programming language during the rise of the home computer in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It was simple and clunky, but effective, and, most importantly, quite easy to learn. When schools started teaching Computer Studies around that time, the lessons centred around programming in BASIC.
The language relied upon a range of instructions, many of which were written in longhand and would have made sense to even the most computer-illiterate user. For example, here is a BASIC program that most people will be able to work out.
10 PRINT “21st Century Dodos”
20 GOTO 10
RUN
If you were to type those lines into your Vic 20 or ZX Spectrum, your screen would be filled with the title of this book over and over again. What fun.
You could, of course, tackle more complex programs, and some of the most popular text adventure games of the time were entirely written in BASIC. However, for more serious gaming you needed specialised code, and as home computing became more about managing fictional football teams and running around tombs with unfeasibly breasted women, and less about two oblongs playing tennis, BASIC became a thing of the past.
At least, it did in its original guise. Ever evolving, BASIC has morphed and changed and can still be seen in the form of Microsoft Visual Basic, which remains a popular language for programmers. Well, I say popular; it drives a lot of them mad, but it is still around. Not quite extinct yet.
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Compact Discs
Can you remember when compact discs were the future? When the presenter on Tomorrow’s World tried to prove they wouldn’t scratch or jump (which we all now know was a lie but we believed back then)? When you plugged in your first CD player? I bet you can still remember the first CD you ever bought. Mine was Hello Hello Hello (Petrol) by Something Happens, a CD single that I purchased a full three months before I had a machine to play it on.
They changed everything. The sound quality was much better than the previously popular cassette (although not as warm and rich as vinyl, as luddites were keen to point out at every available opportunity). They were smaller, so took up less space. They contained more information, so had a longer playing time. There was no A or B side, so bands approached albums very differently, recording songs that were intended to be listened to in a 70(ish)-minute stretch, rather than two 25-minute sessions. The inner sleeve was replaced by the CD booklet. And, although they weren’t indestructible and did skip, they were much more durable than tapes or LPs.
During the late ’80s and throughout the ’90s, music fans spent billions of pounds replacing their old tape and LP collections with new CD versions, which were often remastered with extra tracks. The CD format was seen as the perfect fit for the new albums that came out during that period – albums such as Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits, that is widely claimed to be the first million-selling CD, although U2’s The Joshua Tree is often given that title.
The compact disc itself was invented in the late ’70s and was an offshoot of the laserdisc technology of the same period. Both Sony and Philips were working on prototypes, and the first test CD was a recording of Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. That Tomorrow’s World demonstration took place in 1981, and the album they played was Living Eyes by The Bee Gees which, ironically, is an album that pretty much the whole world has subsequently forgotten including, quite possibly, the brothers Gibb themselves.
The CD went into commercial production in 1982 and the first album to be released on it, rather than an existing album being made available on the format, was 52nd Street by Billy Joel. Since that time, several billion have been manufactured and sold; 400 million a year at the height of its popularity.
Sadly for a technology with the word ‘compact’ in its name, the CD is slowly being killed off by digital music. We can now hold our entire music collection on a device about the size of a playing card, whereas we used to require countless CD racks from IKEA to do the same. Even hardened musos are seemingly content to download new albums straight to their iPod or phone, and sales of compact discs are plummeting, with some artists ignoring the format completely. The CD isn’t dead, and probably won’t be for a fair while given the sheer volume of discs that are out there, but it deserves its place on this endangered list as it is certainly on the decline.
And, somewhere in his huge mansion, Mark Knopfler is softly crying in front of his wall of platinum discs.
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Sony Walkman
Now we come to our cover star, the Walkman. If Sony were to invent it today, it would have to be called the Walkperson, but back in the late ’70s it was perfectly acceptable to be sexist in a brand name.
The origins of the Walkman are actually very interesting. It was created by a Sony engineer, Nobutoshi Kihara, for his chairman, Akio Morita. Morita was flying all around the world on business, and wanted to be able to listen to his favourite operas while travelling. Kihara created a portable tape player with small headphones – a personal stereo.
Of course, Walkman is actually the Sony brand name, most other manufacturers used ‘personal stereo’ as a generic term. Although Sony were widely credited with inventing the technology, there was something called a Stereobelt created by a German, Andreas Pavel, in the early ’70s, and 30 years later Sony had to settle with him and credit him with founding the device.
But, whoever was responsible, it revolutionised entertainment for years, perhaps forever, with the current digital incarnation of iPods and similar devices all owing a great debt to that first simple idea – ‘I want to listen to music on the move, without annoying the people around me.’
Or, ‘without annoying them too much’. The incessant chhzzchhhzchhhzz of noise bleed from the headphones would gradually drive other people mad, especially on commuter trains and buses. This is still a problem today, but most would consider it a small price to pay in return for music on the go.
The first Walkman was a cassette player and that was the standard device for many years. It did evolve into a CD version – the Discman – and now the digital devices we know today. It was the accessory of choice for joggers and roller skaters throughout the ’80s, and paved the way for today’s society where everyone goes around with white earbuds and nobody talks to each other any more.
Oh.
I am sure there are still some people who own and use a Walkman in its original cassette form, but they must be few and far between. As is the nature with any cutting-edge technology, it has been overtaken by smaller, better, and cheaper devices. It played its part, but has now
been cast aside.
End of side one.
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IN THE HOME
Where we all grew up …
Rotary Dial Telephones
You know you are getting old when an everyday object you grew up with now looks like an ancient museum piece. Give a rotary dial phone to anyone under about 25 and they won’t have a clue what to do with it.
Yet, despite the fact that phones haven’t had dials for more than two decades, we still refer to dialling a phone number or dialling someone up. Curious, don’t you think?
The physical act of putting your finger in a hole and moving the dial round meant that many frequently dialled numbers were fixed in our memories, far more so than in these days of speed dial and smartphones. And to prove it, you can probably remember the phone number of the house you grew up in, or perhaps your first boyfriend/girlfriend, purely because your brain has processed the movement so many times. How many numbers on your mobile contacts list do you know by heart today?
Still don’t believe me? Try this: 01 811 8055. Ring any bells?
Rotary dials were essential in the early days of the telephone system as the exchanges operated a pulse dialling system. Each number was represented by a number of pulses, which is why when you dialled the number 5, you could hear five short clicks as the dial moved back round. But, as these networks were updated, we moved to tone dialling, which required buttons.
While this technological progress means we no longer get sore index fingers from repeatedly calling Multi-Coloured Swap Shop to speak to Bucks Fizz (see, you knew you recognised that number), and no longer suffer the physical agony of getting ten numbers into an international call only to misdial the last digit and having to start all over again, we now have to put up with the annoying ‘Press 1 for customer services, press 2 for deliveries, press 3 to speak to an operator’ and so on.
Not all progress is good.
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One Phone in the Home
Do these ring a bell? (Pun noted, but not intended.)
‘Will you get off the phone? I’m expecting a call!’