Blahblah BBC thing.
By Siamese

Many, many moons ago, when I was just a fresh faced nipper I was sitting in the house spazzed out in front of the telly, like usual, watching something shite like Wogan because we weren’t allowed to change the channel or else bad things happened. Something was different that night though – it was hanging in the air, almost tangible, yet I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I sensed there was something that I wasn’t being told, yet I couldn’t think for the life of me what it might be.

Later on that evening, my Dad came back from work - somewhat later than usual. He shouted through to us that he had a surprise for us all. I still did not have a clue what it might be. That night, he had brought back home with him a gift for all the family, and something that I was simply was not expecting. He’d only gone and bought us a fucking computer. Back of the net! Goooooooooooal!

I excitedly looked over our new addition to the family – what one had he got us then? Maybe it was one of those rubbery ZX Spectrums. They had loads of quality games, and a few of my mates had them and couldn’t get enough of them. What about one of those Amstrad thingys? They weren’t bad I suppose. I’d poked about with one in a shop before, and it seemed alright, but not as good as the Speccy. Let’s see what it is then….

Oh fuck me… I know what THAT is…

From little Acorns grow... greedy bastard squirrels.

We were now the proud owners of the almighty Acorn Electron, the stripped down version of the BBC Micro Model B, which everyone knew from school. It seemed like it had become law that all schools had to have them. And everyone and their auntie knew that it had crap games. That’s what I thought at first anyway. We had a few games bundled with the machine, although it was, of course, as they always say “strictly for homework”, which as we all know is load of bollocks – you couldn’t do your homework on it if you tried anyway. So off we went, setting it all up, which took a quite frankly unnecessary 20 minutes or so, just because we had to read everything in the manual to make sure we had done it properly, despite the fact that it was almost impossible not to do so. We took out the introductory cassette, put it in the rather chunky cassette deck, worked out how to make it load, then took our first tentative steps into the world of home computing…

Over the years that we had this machine, I grew to love it for its almost incredible quirkiness. Virtually no one else had one, except for one kid I got to know solely because of the Acorn Electron. As a matter of fact, he’s still one of my best friends today. You couldn’t just buy a joystick and plug it in – oh no. You had to buy a piece of expensive kit, plug it in the back, and only then could you plug in a joystick. Which was crap anyway.

The games took so bloody long to load that it was almost recommended to have a good book to read while waiting. And who cared that we never got the official arcade conversions that all the other computers got? We got some fantastic bootleg versions instead, all of which were a lawsuit unto themselves. The list was huge. We didn’t have Pac-Man; instead we had Snapper, which was frighteningly identical. For Asteroids, we had Meteors. Instead of Donkey Kong, we had Killer Gorilla. Galaga - Zalaga, Space Invaders - Super Invaders, Galaxians - Arcardians, Sinistar - Deathstar; I think you can see the general pattern that emerged.

The only thing that's magic here is
the incredible rug or Mr Daniels'
baldy slaphead.

Then there was the original software, and some of that was fantastic. Repton and its multiple incarnations, Elite, Exile, Chuckie Egg, Citadel, Joe Blade, Spy Cat and Twin Kingdom Valley to name just a few. They were the absolute dogs bollocks - just as good as many of the titles available on its more popular counterparts. And the best thing about most of these games was that they were as cheap as chips, and you could afford to buy them every couple of weeks from your local dodgy pirate game stall down at the Sunday market for about a couple of quid each.

I had loads of these games, all stacked up in precarious piles, which fell down often and hurt a lot when they landed on your head. And if you bought the original AcornSoft titles at the price of a lot more money, they came in massive boxes, which you would open with glee, only to find the cassette looking somewhat pathetic inside. The best bit about these titles was that if you bought a text adventure, such as Philosophers Quest or Sphinx Adventure, it came with a hint booklet hidden in the box, which we didn’t find for at least six months after we bought the computer.

After a while though, and having gone through about 3 different tape decks, each one about the same size as the computer itself, the Electron itself eventually gave up the ghost and went to silicon heaven. No more CHAIN “” to load a game, no more of the fabled Z, X, ‘, / key combination for controls (the key combination of the connoisseur!). It was retired to the attic for a while, as is tradition with all broken and outdated computer equipment, where it gathered dust, and was eventually chucked as part of the annual clearout.

The Acorn Electron was not a computer that many have indulged in, but it certainly wasn't the heap of rubbish that I'd feared it would be, and the memories of its magnificence still remain, not in the heads and hearts of many, but certainly in my own.

April 2005

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