The early days

I have been fascinated by technology for as long as I can remember. When I was a young boy, I used to spend many happy hours dismantling old clocks and radios and try to understand how they worked. I used to fantasise about building robots out of old tin cans and motors out of cars that I would find in the mechanics workshop on my grand parents farm. I developed a fascination with science fiction, and would build motorised contraptions and cars out of mechano, lego and pretty much any useful parts I could get my hands on. Later, when I moved to a new school, I made friends with a rather nerdy pale boy called Oliver who introduced me to the concept of computers, and showed me his electronic experimentation kit. He taught me how to count in binary, which seemed pretty pointless to a boy of 12, but the idea of programming machines really caught my imagination.

We set about borrowing books on computing from the library, which were out of date even then. We learnt as much theoretical stuff about computers, and how they worked as we could, and then one day I came home to find that my step father had bought me a ZX81 from some guy he met in the pub. I was dumbstruck. It was beautiful - so black and elegant, and kinda mysterious. I phoned Oliver to tell him the news, and he wasn't jealous as I expected. He came over and started to explain to me what he had learnt about the BASIC programming language, and we tried out some of the sample programmes from the instruction manual. God was it painful! Nothing seemed to work as I expected, and I was struggling with the bleak abstractness of the language concepts. For those that don't know, the ZX81 had a really nifty innovation called UOTKES - Unique one touch keyword entry system, which meant that you never had to type any programming keywords in full. For instance, if you pressed the letter 'P' then the word 'Print' appeared, and using a combination of function keys, all of the the Sinclair BASIC keywords were accessible through UOTKES.

The ZX81 was an amazing machine for its day. It was so simple, that the way it worked could easily be understood by a teenager. I learnt a lot of basic programming concepts on that machine, including assembler, and sold my own version of scramble to a computer magazine for £10.

A year later, and I managed to scrape enough cash together, along with the sale of my beloved ZX81 for £45, to buy a Sinclair Spectrum. Now, at the time, and considering the price, this machine was the mutts nuts. It had sound, colour, more memory than the ZX81 (48K instead of 16K with a Ram Pack), and had a much better keyboard. It had an extended version of BASIC, and my friends and I just loved playing the games you could get on it. Manic Miner was a particular favourite of ours, along with jet pack, hungry horace, and all sorts of other games that seemed to exude character. I know those games look horribly dated now, but I dont think I've ever enjoyed playing games as much as I did on the Spectrum. Just like the ZX81, it was a fantastic learning tool for kids of all ages, and I really believe that a whole generation of kids were inspired to become software developers by the quirks of the spectrum and other machines like it.

Sadly, those days are gone. PCs rule the roost now, and the kids that play games on them really never gain any insight into the inner working of the machines, as they are just so damned complicated. You really need to have studied electronics and computers at college before you can hope to understand the architecture of a modern home PC. I find it sad that today's teenagers may not really do any programming until they get to further education, as PC programming is far less accessible and more abstract than the early machines. Yes, its easy to pick up some understanding of HTML, and JavaScript, but they are completely detached from the workings of the PC, and its getting harder and harder to have the simple joy of having total control over a machine, as my generation did as teenagers.