A tale of toast ... and exploding keys

With the upcoming adventure of a baby just a few weeks down the road I can’t help but think back to my childhood again and again. This is primarily due to the fact that I now get the perfect excuse to buy more toys! This is also a reflection of the fact that I am 35 going on 12 and before you think any further that’s exactly the age of gaming I want to be.

Looking back to when it all started I remember a good friend of mine, Simon Steed. Now he was a man for whom gadgets were the way forward and his house was a tribute to this. Simon was indeed much older than I and we actually met while my Dad was buying me a CB ariel.

We spoke often on the CB and soon he became friends with all the family. At this point I was introduced to TECH. Tech being the one sole fab and groovy thing that was missing from my life at that time.

Saturday mornings soon became a regular trip to his house. I recall boxes of wires, boxes with a multitude of flashing lights and so on... for sure the boxes with flashing lights interested me no end as by this time it was obvious that at the tender age of 12 Knight Rider was indeed king followed closely in second place by Automan. The garage at his place was then my den... from here I could go wild with stuff and no one cared. Everything in there was in his eyes past time and I could pull, cut break and weld anything to anything at my leisure. This was fun ... much fun.

One particular Saturday saw me in the garage tinkering around. I found an old amp with around 20 lights on it, plugged it in and powered it up. Hurrah! The light became a dance ... cool! To that I added an old tape deck and ferreted around for a few tapes, found some and played them. Queen! That’ll do nicely. So, I now had a mini system! And it worked. With the sound turned up I started to claw thru a new and as yet un-searched box. At the bottom I saw something I had never seen before ... a ZX80 ...

um, a calculator of sorts I thought. Further investigation revealed its true nature, a computer! Well sort of. It did have the one thing I needed thou, the ability to type my name and have it shown on a screen. Grabbing a portable TV from the shed, hooked it up and my whole world changed. I had (or thought I had) a time machine... well... it could have been. It was great. Not only did I have my own music but a screen in which to type my name and have it repeated on the screen... what more could I possibly need! This was truly a place in heaven.

I figure you all know that this story will turn slightly bad, so here goes.

After some hours the novelty of this began to wear off. Soon I started to look for ways of improving my setup. I noticed that the ZX80 had a power block controlling the flow of electric from the plug to the unit... um, that must be the problem, if I removed that I could run lots more power into this unit and it would be fantastic so I got a pair of cutters and hacked the block off the main line, rewired it so the plug on the wall socket ran directly into the zx80 .... Everything was prepared ... wires on, ready to switch on!

5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1

BANG!

FUCKIN HELL! I launched like a rat! I had bits of ZX all over me, one of the touch key bits even stuck to my head!

Never again! I had mucho explaining to do... although I did blame most of it on the fact that the garage was a bit damp!.... um .... yea ....

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