I am a bit wishy-washy and useless with this bug thing I have.So I have been perusing the beebs iplayer site.There is currently an electric dreams series running on BBC4,it brings back so many memories.First I watched this,bearing in mind I wasn't ten until december 71 it was a real memory stirrer,so I then went on and watched the eighties programme,followed rapidly by this brill little docudrama on Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry and the start of the home computing revolution in the UK.
I did my first ever programming in BBC Basic,just simple maths programmes and stuff that played rewarding bleeps to the kids when they got answers right,but it was the start of my eternal love affair with computers.Through the seventies and eighties I had a veritable shoal of machines coming and going through my house from the atari,acorns bbc machine,to the electron,the zx80/81 and the Commodore 64,there is still a machine in my loft with twin 51/4 inch floppy drives. I even have a circa 1980 dot matrix printer that would still work(it does in some of the older unix flavours) except you cannot get windows software for it any-more.
It was all so simple then................
A little add on here.......
The favourite game in our house in the eighties was Repton,written by fifteen year old Tim Tyler.......if you have kids who program keep an eye on them,Tim appears to be a nice enough chap but he is absolutely barking if his home page is anything to go by.He has made a small on-line Java version of Repton called Rockz...........
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My first computer was little more than a word processor complete with Daisy wheel printer - it was the Amstrad PCW 9512. It was actually quite expensive at £499. I had a subscription to the PCW magazine.
http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=190
aah, the acorn electron, you made me quite nostalgic. It was my son's first computer, when he was about six. We were totally broke at the time, just me and the kids, struggling for money. They reduced the electron to a bargain price in Smiths (it was alrady practically obsolete) I loaded them all onto the bus from Harrow to Brent Cross to get one. It worked in BBC basic, didn't it? And you could load on programs frm a tape cassette. We had such fun with that machine. And it must have started something, look at him now!
It's still in the loft.
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