As hinted at last time, the arrival of the ST saw games pretty much taking a back seat for a while as we got to grips with all the raw power now available at the wiggle of a mouse. Moving up in leaps and bounds from the Art Studio into both Neochrome and Public Painter meant we were suddenly producing reasonable looking inlays for all those cassettes. Hell, I even ended up doing posters for "things at the school" thanks to keen parents being "involved". Boot Sales were my speciality for a few giddy months before summer came along and I left Sir Freds, never to return.

Public Painter especially got a lot of use, after all we only had a black and white printer so didn't really need to do much in colour for output thusly. What amazed me most about this proggy was that we found it in amongst the first batch of public domain disks to be obtained. It was free! How did that work? Getting decent software (OK, a few gems in amongst a load of dross) without having to wander in to town or make the trip to Stevenage. Must have been a mistake, but no it was all for real. Very soon the house was full with printed lists and photocopied catalogues offering tantalizingly brief descriptions of what was on offer. Maze Game. Printer Utility. Speech Synthesiser. Star Plotter. Adventure Game. Art Package. And many others on the same disk. Not quite enough to tell you what you might get but enough to make it worth risking a couple of quid for duplication and postage. The jiffy bags were soon being shoved through the door by the post man.

The next thing to get a lot of use was actually a text file buried on one such disk. So much that it was soon printed and stuck in a folder. And further revised versions got the sane treatment until it was properly published and bought in boom form. That file was called "Your Second Manual" and was written by a mad Dane called Andreas Ramos (NOTE: no breach of rule one need be inferred from this recall of title and author, it is indelibly burned in my memory and pops up from time to time when I am least expecting it. If random firing of synapses counts as research then I quit!). How can I be so sure he was mad? Well, apart from personal experience of my Danish friends and relatives who all seem to be a bit mad there was also the section about mouse mats. Don't waste your money on specially produced mouse mats, says Mr Ramos. Simply go down to your local wet suit store and ask them for a neoprene offcut - they are bound to have plenty left over from making them for their customers. Now perhaps people can correct me here, but I can't recall seeing a single wet suit shop in Welwyn Garden City (even at the local boating/windsurfing lake they certainly didn't have offcuts) and never spotted one on my trips to Denmark. Have you got one on your high street?

Needless to say we didn't rush out in search of neoprene for computer purposes (what I do in my spare time is my business...) but then we didn't need to buy a mouse mat anyway, having got one free with the computer in the first place. And today, as I glance to the right of the keyboard I am currently typing on, I see no evidence of spare chunks of wet suit protecting my Logitech's ball from the horrors of my desk. In fact, the mouse here sits on a mat that was purchased by my Parents last time they were in Copenhagen and features a cartoon of a man shouting at his PC in disgust. I wonder where Andreas is now. (OK, I had to know so cheated here. Google says he is working in Silicon Valley and still writing manuals with guest star cats. Well done that man!).

And then there were fractals. This was the time of Chaos theory hitting the mainstream. James Gleick was top of the best seller lists (not that anyone buying the book for the pretty patterns on the front cover could understand a work of what was going on inside), Benoit Mandelbrot was getting interviewed on Saturday Morning telly and Strange Attractions the shop had opened up in Notting Hill selling swirly things to all an sundry. Naturally we had to have a Mandie generator ourselves and the pd libraries came up trumps. The first ones were slower than treacle flowing uphill, but a couple of updates sonn allowed us to see the pretty things ourselves without being able to go out for a couple of hours after pressing the button. And only a few more years before we could get our revenge on the bloody things with the arrival of Llamatron.

Fractal Landscapes were even more interesting. Stick in a few numbers and out pops geography like you'd never imagined. And you could then play with the sea level and water line. Fascinating stuff that kept us going through the summer. Of course I then went and got a couple of weeks work with the local council stuffing things into envelopes for them which generated a bit of cash to help with the first few weeks of impending college but further reduced time spent playing with pixels. So while the O level result day had been spent playing endless games of Batty on the speccy while waiting for the time to collect them from the school, A level day was in an office. Was this the way of things to come?

Then two weeks later we packed the house into assorted boxes and upped sticks to Felixstowe. A week later I was shifting again and about to start three years in Derby. And the speccy was to make a stunning comeback...

Simon

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