3. Bringing Work Home

There was obviously an upside to having a father who worked with computers. One such 1970s upside saw me dragged along to his office as part of some proto-“bring a child to work” day. I got to do stuff like feed huge packs of punched cards into steel boxes. Boxes that loosely resembled a herd of large chest freezers. This was cool. The computer floor was officially as big as a football pitch and dotted about it were crates of blinking lights, the odd green monitor and some twitching reel-to-reel tapes about the size of large dinner plates. Everything was white or orange. It looked like the set of Space 1999 or Mission Control or the lair of some devious bond villain, only without the staff jumpsuits. Despite being terrified that I was about to drop my leaning tower of punched cards, I was fascinated.

Is that Terry Nutkins at the typewriter?

I’m sure he thought that when I was exposed to computers, I would leap on them with eager fingers and start programming a rudimentary spreadsheet or something. Unfortunately, perhaps, my fascination was to carry me in a different direction to that envisioned by my dad.

Fast-forward a couple of years and I’m going through a phase of Airfix kits and Scalextric. I’d been coveting my Uncle Mike’s Intellivision for a while now too; especially Auto Racing which I thought was much cooler than the other sports rubbish on it and just a bit like my beloved Scalextric. Only on TV. Sadly, my dad just didn’t get games. His was a world where computers were given stark names like ME29 or PDP11, or named after popular fruit (but only if the machione was one you could fit through a doorway).

I did a Google Images search for ME29 and it came up with this

When the Sinclair ZX81 came into the house, it even came with the little printer that used the weird silver paper that even a public loo would pass-on. My dad had visions of turning me into a junior him, but I just wanted to play Asteroids. In 1K. No amount of parental influence could persuade me that business software was in any way interesting. Certainly nowhere near as interesting (or pant-wettingly scary) as 3D Monster Maze.

Despite my resistance dad did have some small success in getting me to program the thing. I wrote a passable attempt at Tutankham, the real version of which I was playing rather too much at the time. By passable I mean that it didn’t scroll, used various text characters for enemies and was a lovely shade of crosshatch grey. Oh, and it was written in basic. The maps, however, were spot-on copies of the coin-op, although I only reached the fourth level a couple of times so that last one might have been less than true.

Despite this setback, my dad’s attempts at educating me continued. Whilst all my mates were getting Spectrums and the posh kids at school were being awarded BBCs by their high-flying parents, my dad brought home a thing called a Torch. On closer inspection it turned out to be a business-oriented BBC Model B made of armour-plated steel with a built in colour monitor and a floppy drive or two. Oh yes! Finally a computer that plays a mean game of Defender! One that scrolled left as well as right! Except it didn’t. The damn thing was the freak bastard offspring of the beeb, and it was built to confound my attempts to play games on it… especially the good ones. Why else would it let me play JCB Digger without a hitch (disregarding the epileptic scrolling) and yet refuse to even load Elite?

My father’s adoption of the unloved and undesirable of the home computing world continued apace. Next came an Amstrad CPC 6128 (presumably the huge 128k memory was for even bigger spreadsheets) which initially had one solitary game for it; Sorcery Plus, and the worst tape loading I have ever come across. Dad obviously hoped that it would put a stop to my gameplaying! I played it to death obviously.

He considered buying a Jupiter Ace (forth anyone?) and an Oric (oh just piss off), and eventually did buy one of those Amstrad green-screen word processor thingies that had CP/M and a version of Head Over Heals that appeared to be made of bits of moss and old twigs. Was it too much too ask for something as simple, obvious and fun as a C64 or a Spectrum? I could only dream of being able to swap games with my mates, hastily copied on their big sister’s stereo. I would never have that delicious moment of opening Ultimate’s oversized packaging and thinking ‘I paid an extra fiver for that?’ And, y’know, just maybe I might have even bothered to program one of them. Well, maybe if my joystick broke or something.

It may come as no surprise to learn that our video was a Betamax.

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