The First 1000(ish) Words
It all began with the unwrapping of a medium to large box on Christmas morning in 1983.
A trip had been made to the local electrical shop in late summer the previous year, to stand in front of a number of very expensive home computers with integrated printers, and colourful keyboards, and various pieces of literature had been handed out by the aging sales staff that would kick around the house for the next few months along with a flyer for a fledgling satellite television service called “Sky”.
It didn't help that the sales manager was the same white haired guy that arrived each month to collect rental fees for the television in the lounge. He was perhaps sixty years old, white haired, slighyly rotund, and drove an expensive “executive” car. Hair grew from both his ears and his nose, but the parents of the household seemed to know him, and he spend quite some time when he came to visit. We had no idea what he talked about, because we were invariably playing outside with our friendskicking a football around, and trying to avoid hitting the expensive car parked outside our house too many times.
We never did buy the Sharp computer, and Sky Television didn't enter our house for another decade or more. The box unwrapped on Christmas Morning in 1983 had three letters printed along it's side”MSX”.
Of course it wasn't our first computerbut then who would have described the fake-teak emblazoned lump of black plastic underneath the rented television in the lounge as a computer? In later years we would learn that it had been an “Atari 2600”, but back then it was just the machine that my brother played Defender on with his friends, and that I grew bored playing Asteroids on, and instead pretended my ten pixel spaceship was some kind of inter-stellar rally car, speeding between the asteroids before inevitably wiping out, and scattering itself across the screen with a hollow boom sound.
The Atari had arrived one summer evening. I remember seeing my Dad pull up on the drive in the car, and vaguely remember my overweight brother lumbering into the house with the box, with a very serious look on his eleven year old face. Our house saw more visitors during those summer holidays than any year before or since. Television time became fought overbetween morning re-runs of Champion the Wonder Horse, The Monkees, and fighing off the infinite swarms of the Zurg armada in endless rounds of Space Invaders, Phoenix, or Defender.
I never got much of a look-in.
The next encounter with a computer came when the family business retired their aging accounts workstation for an IBM XT. It had a metallised sticker on the front of the box with the word “Alphatronic”, and the greek letter “Alpha” emblazoned on the impressive (and cavernous) exterior. A green screen monitor illuminated the room as it booted from a 5.25 floppy disk, before dumping us a command prompt that we knew nothing at all about. One day a friend of my brother came to visita quiet, skinny boy with a pudding bowl haircutand set about writing a program. Half an hour later the computer was asking us which planet we would like to blow up, before counting down from 10, and informing us that said planet had been successfully destroyed. Such flagrant use of power impressed us all gratefully, and we spent an entire morning blowing up all of the planets of the local solar system, along with most of the Star Wars worlds, many from the Buck Rodgers TV series, and a good few from Star Trek too.
One day the Alphatronic stopped working, and nothing we attepted would bring it back to lifethe hoover, furniture polish, a hefty whack on the back of the plastic casing. Eventually the hardware was donated to the local secondary school for the ginger haired Computer Studies teacher to use as a teaching aid. I can only imagine how he might have used it”Look kidsthis is what a really terrible, non-standard computer looks likeone day half of you will own extremely expensive mobile phones that are non-standard, and defend them to your friends making yourself look rather silly, but for now you'll just have to imagine what a mobile phone is, because they haven't been invented yet”.
So yes. 1983 was really the year when everything changed.
The Alphatronic had not been “mine”, and what little we did find inside it's rusty innards was written in German. The Atari 2600 wasn't mine, and fought for television time with my brother, who did a very nice line in dead legs and crow-pecks (a particularly evil form of adolescent punishment, involving a head-lock, and knuckles rapped against the top of your skull to make hollow knocking noises). The MSX unwrapped that Christmas morning was mine.
For much of Christmas Day that year the computer was put to one side, with a promise to set it up a “bit later on”. As any child knows, “a bit later on” is code for never, and never is only a little less time than “presently”the dreaded word used by Grandparents when you asked when anything would be happening.“When are we going to the sweet shop Grandad?”“Presently”(insert scene where young child falls to the floor in agony at the futility of their situation”they said the P word!“)A bit later on finally transpired, and we rapidly discovered that we needed something extra. After a little rummaging around upstairs I arrived in the lounge with a hand-held tape recorder that my Grandfather had given me perhaps a year previouslyit had large mechanical buttons across the front, and an auxhiliary out that would attach to the computer. We would of course learn over the coming days, weeks, and months that the tape recorder was at the centre of a new black-art, filled with screeching noises, and occasional metallic bongs.