Part 1

This is a trip a little bit further back than some of the Rodents have yet gone.

I'm not talking about arcade games here - although the lure of Boot Hill at Filey Amusements did have a certain pull for me when I was all of what, 11 years old. Ah. Filey Amusements. I must revisit that hallowed place - but another time.

No, it's computers I want to talk about. But before I get started, I would like to fully invoke Rule 1. I can't remember dates etc for shit. My brain just isn't wired up that way. I can remember the incidents and the feelings, but putting them into some sort of time frame - sorry, ain't gonna happen. And anyway - we're talking pre-history here. I've read the stories about Amigas, and Atari STs. I've remembered fondly the C64, Spectrum and Dragon days. I've revisited my brief flirting with the old pal that was my Atari 800. But this story predates those. If this article were a TV documentery, it'd have Simon Schama wandering round pontificating about the importance of these times as a foundation of what was to come.

So, cut to the small 'computer room' at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Gainsborough. In reality a converted cloakroom. You could fit about 3 or 4 people in there alongside the venerable Commodore PET 3032. Ahh, the old PET. My first contact with a computer. A real computing machine. I mean look at it. Straight out of some dodgy 80s Sci-Fi programme. I even remember that it sounded right - with just the right sort of >clack< as you hit the keys.
I honestly cannot remember what made me visit this room for the first time. I knew about computers - I was into electronic games, but I can't remember the point where I heard about the PET and thought "I'll have some of that".

As I remember, there were only a few of us who were really interested. Me, Ian, Aussie, Andy and a couple of older students. Eventually, we used to try to get on the beast at every available opportunity. Breaktimes, lunch - I can still recall being thrown out by the caretaker as he was going round the school locking up, with him shaking his head, telling us that even all the teachers had gone. We'd obviously been overlooked...

We all threw ourselves into the fledgling scene as it was then. Buying 'Teach yourself Basic' books, and while other kids were scribbling the names of girls and/or bands in the back of their exercise books, ours were filled with lines of basic code. And Girls. And Bands. But the code was there in amongst it all. We started to buy computing magazines, and started to soak in all the jargon and learn to love the tech, eagerly soaking up information on what made these things tick (bleep?), and reading about the exciting things to come. through these magazines, we also learned of the computers that we could have at home. Remember, this was BC - Before Clive. Ferreted away in the small ads that were placed at the side of the type-in program listings were adverts for the UK-101, Nascom, Acorn Atom - all these were aimed at the home or hobbyist user. Much more affordable than the Apple computers that were in the big ads. The only drawback was you had to build them yourself. But more on this later...

And games on the PET? Well, we had the heady choice of Nibbles and Hunt the Wumpus. That was it. Nibbles involved bombing little chompy dudes that flew from left to right and ate away parts of a dam that would burst should enough get through. and I know I don't have to explain Wumpus to you lot, right? It wasn't much, but it was enough.

Initially the PET had a cassete drive. After a while, the school got the cash together to buy a mighty double disk drive - a beast that was almost as big as the PET itself! So as we set about adding ,8 to all our little programs, the stack of disks in the room grew slowly.

I don't know where it came from to be honest. Suddenly it just seemed to be there. Maybe one of the other guys can rememeber, but I'd like to think that the small gods of gaming apported it into the room to seal the devotion of some fledgling game disciples.
The disk label just had S.I. written on it. Of course we had to pop it in and check it out - it could have been another programmaing effort by one of the older kids, and we liked nothing better than pouring scorn on their wonky code.
The disk was slid in. The wonderfully solid door/lock mechanism that those old PET drives had was engaged, and the disk was queried.
Hmmm. A program. Wonder what it does... [a brief pause while the program is loaded & run]
At first look it seemed to be nothing interesting. A bit of a schematic for hooking up a speaker to one of the PETs ports. But then...

Oh. My. God.

After hitting a key, the screen cleared to show a Space Invaders layout. And what's more it looked just like a [chunky] version of the original.

After a few minutes of scrabbling for the keys to play, that was that. Coding was put to one side, gaming was in. As long as the teachers didn't catch you playing of course.

Anyway, time passed.

Clive put aside his digital watches and calcualtors, and gave the nation their first affordable taste of digital narcotics through the snowy whiteness of the ZX80. Once he had his first few thousand computing junkies hooked, he upped th ante with the ZX81. We were intigued. Plans were laid about saving money together, and jointly buying one that we would share. This never really happened.
And anyway, it didn't seem right to me. It wasn't a real computer like the PET. I had my eye on something a little meatier. And I thought with Christmas approaching, and the possibility of rolling a Christmas and Birthday present into one, that I could just about convince my parents to get me a computer I'd been coveting from those small adverts in the magazines.

I wanted an Acorn Atom.

[To be continued...]

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