BrendanDawes.com - personal website for Brendan Dawes
Title
brendandawes.com : contains mild peril
Description
Back at home I had an Atari 2600 or “woody” as they’re now known. It might seem mad now but we used to spend hours playing Space Invaders and Asteroids. And I mean 5, 6 hours at a stretch. I also remember Kaboom by Activision being another one that kept us up for hours.
My first real computer though was a Sinclair ZX81. It came with a massive 1K of RAM, but luckily I also had a 16K RAM pack! Black and white, no sound, not much graphics but it rocked. For the first time people could own a personal computer that didn’t cost the earth. What was great about the ZX81 was that it came with a book on how to program it. You had to learn to program in BASIC because there was hardly any programs available for it. Just imagine if today you got your shiny computer home to find that all it did was blink a cursor at you! I think the first thing everyone did when they started to program the ZX81 was fill the screen with a word - usually something rude and then go into the local Dixons and do the same on their demo machines. As you left the store the screens behind you would be filled with the word "knob", "penis" or something similar. It was almost like hacking on the high street! Dixons deserve it anyway - useless bastards.
You may think with all this “cutting edge” technolgy in my life back then I would have joined the computer club at school or something. Well the thing was the computer club had one BBC micro and one Commodore Pet. Plus it was full of "A" streamers - and I definately wasn’t one of them. It was obviously felt that only the seemingly more intelligent kids were worthy enough to be taught how to use these new fangled machines. When I look back on it now, the school, in fact most schools at the time, really underestimated the impact computers were going to make.
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