Sometimes they went with a bang, the circuits of others quietly stopped flowing as you slept. They slipped away and the time of pain was over. Unlike elderly relatives though, 1980s computers sometimes also died young, died violently, or didn’t die at all. For those that have survived, both elderly relatives and Amigas, Texas Ti99s, BBC Model Bs etc, life in the 21st century often takes the form of attic-based cryogenic storage. Just occasionally a rogue C64 finds itself a new niche as a web-server, a fax-server or as a toy for poor people. Continuing to labour the already thin analogy, you could say that such new-lives are akin to old people working in charity shops – very worthy but utterly pointless.

Thankfully that’s where the similarity between wrinklies and 8-bit computers ends – old tech, for example, doesn’t smell of wee. Unless of course if somebody actually has pissed in it. YakYak forum member Filz explains:

“My Commodore C64 was still a thing of wonder to me when my brother ruined it by pissing over the case. On rare occasions I was allowed to bring the machine down to use on our big telly, whenever I did I would have to put the machine down on a tray on the floor (my Dad said that the tray was to ‘stop static from sucking up the carpet fibres, son’). My brother was eighteen months old and having a ‘fresh air bum’ moment when he wandered over to see what I was doing, then froze in mid-step, got that glazed eye thing that only babies and pissed Glaswegian dossers have, and shot a jet of yellow wee all over the keyboard. Greens at Debenhams, bless 'em, gave us an exchange.”

Spilling stuff into your computer was always a popular computer-killing choice as these YakYakker’s recall:

"We want to kill your technology with our death liquids."

“I spilt tea and Wonka's Nerds into my BBC B (though not at the same time). And it survived! And then my dad sold it. Bastard.” – Stone.

“Around 1989, I spilt milk all over my desk, but didn't bother cleaning it up. A few months later my dad noticed this foul smell coming from the C64, lifted it up and there was a load of sick-smelling congealed milk shit all over the bottom of the computer. It still worked for a while but the milk probably contributed to its later demise in the mid-90's. Oh, and jabbing scissors in the cartridge port trying to make it reset probably didn’t help…” – Lightengine.

“Rubber-key Spectrum + NCoT = Death.” – Hmobius.

Other machines met with more violent deaths, some of these stories are a bit sadistic, so umm, hold tight:

The frankly scary Gravy lost it with his Acorn Atom: “I took the circuit board out and stabbed a knife through it into the wall where it hung for 2 months.”

Gravy yesterday.

“My C64, Spectrum, NES, SNES and Megadrive are all alive. But I killed an Amstrad 8086 PC with a sledgehammer. I hated that machine.” – Gordon.

“First computer was a ZX Spectrum+. Cause of death: removed and replaced Kempston interface while the Speccy was switched on. Did it again. And again. And again. And again and again and again. Fitzzzz. Nothing. I was eight years old and I got bored easily. Be merciful.” – PhilSmith.

Trolley summed-up many of the violent computer death tales when he told us that his Amiga 500+ "got thrown at the wall.”

These days PCs are all modular and standardised so that now an internal fuck-up with a screwdriver might only result in needing a new memory module, or a CD-ROM drive, whatever – all cheap dull identikit components. Back when a Commodore 64 was £200 ($400 in 1986), and your parents would whip you if they even suspected you of having used the computer (for doing homework) without washing your hands first, those who ventured inside the case did so at considerable personal and financial risk:

“When the keyboard finally packed up on my C64, I thought I could fix it by hammering a large nail into the hole formerly used by the '4' key.
I was wrong...” – moobaa.

“My Vic20 died within the first couple of weeks of bringing it home… thing is, when you’re a young kid the time it took Dixons to repair the bastards seemed like an eternity, so I ended up taking the Vic to pieces to ‘see how it worked’” – mISTER_jOHNNO

Xav – “Tore off the membrane keyboard,” from his ZX81 “intending to fit something more user friendly or to use the computer as the brains for a robot. Never got any further than that though.”

Fox considered himself to be a soldering genius only to short his Atari ST when fitting extra memory: “I posted the beasty off to a professional to have it properly sorted out at which point the post office promptly lost it. The silver lining was that the PO insurance people were so inept they sent me two replacement cheques so the 512 ST mutated, overnight, into a 1024 STFM with printer and a monitor, with enough cash left over to have some beer money for university.”

Pretty much how it is - DIY wise.

”The ones I had die were a Speccy +3 (floppy drive belt wore out), and a Spectrum 48k which, umm, exploded after I ‘modified’ the power supply. *ahem*.” – MadHippo.

But home-repair doesn’t always end badly as Ratsoap witnessed: “I got an ST from a friend which had broken keyboard. On opening the case to investigate, it transpired that someone had pounded the keyboard in frustration and sent a case-post right through the PCB. My dad managed to patch the connections up with little bits of wire and it still works to this day.”

But it was the random deaths that tended to be the most fun, what with the sparks and the flashes and the weird smells:

“My spectrum thermal printer caught fire mid print of the jetpac title screen. It was like a free light show.” – Polyhex.

“The speccy died in about 1989, giving out a rather nasty burning smell that I didn't investigate too closely.” - cyric100.

"It was only when half the Sinclair ZX80 came flying, on fire, past my left ear that I realised that bypassing the mains transformer probably wasn't as great an idea as I'd first thought." - Mark@RetroVision.

Our Trolley made something of a habit of killing Sinclair machines: “My first Spectrum died twice. The first time was when I pulled the joystick interface out of the back without switching it off first and it went frazzle frazzle spark... nothing. After costing my Dad 60 squid to get it repaired it never really behaved itself again. A few months later, replacement Spectrum in-hand,on a particularly fine summers day, we had trailed an extension power-cable outside so we could play games in the sunshine (which is exactly what his mum had told us to do – ‘Why don't you go outside and play? A nice day like this and you're cooped up inside in front of the telly.’). The problem was, we went back inside for a bite to eat at teatime, and forgot about it. It rained. Bye bye Speccy. Oh yeah, and bye bye telly too.”

Of course many would argue that the only fitting death for a games computer is for it to meet its digital maker during actual play:

“After more than a decade of use, my Atari 800xl died. It was just literally worn down from so much use. The metallic covering of the 'Start' and 'Option' buttons had clearly visible wear marks from being mashed down so many times from playing so many games. Keep in mind the Atari 800xl was a sturdy built machine compared by today's standards, any other computer might not have taken the gaming abuse that I put it through.” – MikeVox.

Machine killing Hyper Sports.

“There was one instance with my Atari 130XE where after just two days of ownership I thought I'd broken it. I was playing a rather heated game of Dropzone and in a desperate bid to stay alive I smashed the spacebar down for the Smart Bomb – it went all floppy! So there I was brand new machine, screwdriver in hand taking it to bits. Warranty? What warranty?” – Ely.

“So far only had one machine die on me - the Acorn Electron. I still believe it was the struggle of Elite which did the poor fellow in. During a session the screen went black, the power light went off and never came on again. So that Christmas ('88) the Atari 520STFM became mine.” – Ewan.

Arv reminds us that it wasn’t just the computers that took the strain: “What about the Quickshot IIs that got thrown around the room, against the wall, got bitch slapped etc. Only to then be un-screwed and to have the little bit of metal 'lifted' up a little bit more. Or if you were more elite you could make a new one out of a tin can...”

The breakdown of a computer relationship can be a tough blow. Your beloved machine lives on but with a new partner. The two Jims tell us of their painful experiences:

Jimaroid first – “My Spectrum never died, I just broke its heart like a betraying lover when I sold it to the Milkman. I felt so dirty seeing that machine walk off down the drive in its battered box – I had cast it away, grabbed the cash and had run towards an Amiga. I regretted selling it for a while, but then I'd hear of how much fun the Milkman's kids were having with it and I realised it was the way it should have been. I could have hoarded my speccy away in the attic—trying to hold onto those memories—where it's heart would have slowly stopped from loneliness. But I didn't, I found it a new home and it gave that family as much joy as it had given mine. That's how I remember the end of my speccy, it just kept on giving.”

"Does't my joystick make thee happy?"

Biggestjim is, understandably, less comfortable with the fate of his machine: “When I betrayed my Commodore 128-d with a Megadrive, my mother sent it away (including all my Zzap megatapes and hundreds of games) to poor Polish children. So much for supporting East European civilisation.”

Sometimes though, our wonderful machines just get old. Bit-senility is an odd phenomenon as Datassette recalls: “Two of my old computers are getting a bit confused in their old age. 1) Acorn Electron – A Bit Senile (Takes a good Half Hour to realise its ON). 2) Amiga 500 – Shows a yellow screen for a good while and then suddenly realises 'Oh Shit, Have you switched me on? Oh right, OK then'. Likes to eat disks too - 'Come on Amiga, give it back now.' it takes four nurses to pin the poor old bastard down and extract the disk with tweezers.”

And then the saddest computer death of all. The one where you don’t get a chance to say ‘goodbye’: “My Commie died not with a bang but with a whimper. I went on holiday one year -- when I left it was working, when I came back it had gone silently into the night.” – MrSnrub.

KOWORLD, April 2004.

Read on, for two more particularly shocking computer deaths:

vent for freedom

Ahh, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth. The solemn, tear-streaked faces of a family united in grief. The kind of 21-joystick salute normally reserved for heads of state.

Course it had been on the cards quite some time. It was getting on a bit, and the thing about the old c64/vic20 power supply was that it kept your grubby toes nice and warm - I mean this baby threw out heat. Anyway, eventually, it got to the stage where the toes really got toasted, and that was the beginning of the end. It just got hotter and hotter, until pffzz fizzle - dead (can't put it technically any better than that).

And so, 'the power-pack ritual' began: Leave it for ten minutes, fire up the c64 again, pay sibling ten pence to waft the unit cool with a Salford Advertiser so I could get past Ivan Puncheredov on Frank Bruno's boxing. Rinse, repeat.

Inevitably, seven year olds arms get tired, and no amount of beating or lucre will induce them to continue. In a fit of helpless pique, I heated a breadknife, white-hot on the stove, ready to open up a few new 'vents'. And yes maybe I should've done it outside and no, molten plastic doesn't come out of axminster in any known universe (I've got the rolled-up dishtowel scars to prove that).

"I'm melting... meeeeelting."

Amazingly, by pure fluke it didn't totally fuck it though and even delayed the overheating by a full 15 minutes - there was a god! But that triumph of reckless knifeplay over technology was short-lived. Within a week, it was pffft pffut pfizzle again. Eventually, our Steve solved the problem. I came home from my milk round one Saturday and he was there fisting lumps out of 'Peter Perfect'. 'Impossible', I say. 'You'd have to be playing a solid 40 minutes to get that far on FB's Boxing!'

'I have.' he says, smugly.

'Well... how in God's name?' I stammer, pointing at the brick of death.

'I put it in the freezer,' he says, dodging an uppercut, 'overnight'.

Eventually, around the mid-1990s we laughed about it. After all, the whole street was reconnected in less than half a day.

R.I.P - C64 power pack ca.1981 - 'She sleeps with the ice-pops.'

F0ZZ, April 2004.


smashy - smashy

Over the years I owned two Commodore 64s, both now deceased. The first lived hard, died young. The second lived a long and productive life, passing away only recently after a short illness. I care more about the first one - it is always the ones that die young you remember most fondly.

I still remember coming home one day to find a Commodore 64 laid out in the living room. It wasn't even Christmas or my Birthday. It was just... there. Reading the instructions I was completely amazed - it had 8 sprites, 16 colours, a SID chip, and a phenomenal 64 Kilobytes of RAM (twice as much as any other home computer). We didn't have any games though. Instead we went out and bought a magazine which had game listings you typed in. With the combined typing ability of a spastic snail we entered our first game over a period of 3 days - my mum typing during the day, while me and my brother took turns typing through the evening. Because we didn't know how to save (that was at the end of the instruction book) we left the C64 switched on the whole time. Little did we know that the C64 power supply had a serious overheating problem.

All 1980s videogamers had fingers like these.

The Commodore was soon relegated to my bedroom where I spent many an evening playing Skramble and learning how to make the typed-in game work. Although the TV upstairs was only Black and White, and there was no heating - the endless hours spent there were to shape my life. Unfortunately my first-choice career of spaceship pilot was unavailable, so programming it had to be. Of course typing away at a monochrome display with blue fingers isn't ideal, and wrapping your feet around the power supply block only keeps you warm for so long. So I used to sneak the C64 downstairs at every opportunity to lie full length in front of the fireplace and play until I was caught and sent back upstairs. I think of my C64 not just a willing accomplice, but as actively goading me into more-blatant attempts at getting it installed in the living room 'where it belonged' - each time only to be banished again to the frigid wasteland of my bedroom.

Eventually it happened. I still don't know if my frozen fingers slipped, or the self-destructive rockstar nature of the beast took hold, but during a rebellious sneak downstairs the C64 escaped. Leaping from step to step it finally clattered to rest at the base of the stairs, broken. Frozen, I just stared at the wreckage from above as everyone else crowded round. The case had bulged at the seam, and the keyboard looked like a rugby player's smile. The machine was dead.

Gone. Forgotten. Unloved. The Spectrum 128+. I think?

After a period of mourning had taken place, we bought a new C64. Although very similar to the first one, it just wasn't the same. The keys were a different colour for one thing. This one found itself living permanently upstairs, now accompanied by a colour TV and portable heater: guarding the machine - brainwashing it, keeping it safe, breaking it's spirit. The rebellious spark was no longer there, the games were still good but the moment had passed. It wasn't much later that I discovered cars and women and Atari STs (not necessarily in that order, or importance). The C64 stayed around, solid and reliable, only to decline in it's later years - corrupting the screen display, or not starting up correctly, until finally refusing to start at all. Braindead, my C64 is now laid to rest in its box alongside the original, still working, power supply.

EKENDRICK, April 2004.

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