Recently I’ve been reading some of Jeff “Yak” Minter’s nostalgic look back at how he got into writing computer games in the 1980s, and it’s got me thinking about those days, and how it’s shaped my life — or at least, my professional working life. It’s something I have written about briefly before, but I thought I might re-visit it in epic format. (Yes, I fully realise this might bore some people to tears.)

Early 80s

In the early 1980s, personal computers started to come onto the home market. Not the multibox PCs you see nowadays of course, and certainly not limited to the big 3 formats (Windows, Linux, Mac) that you see now. No, there were dozens of different types of computers, usually a single keyboard box, often using cassettes for storage and generally plugged into a TV. (Nowadays they’re trying to get computers off desks and into the livingroom, as a centrepiece of home entertainment, plugged into a TV again.)

I was vaguely interested in technology in primary school, but there were no computers there. I was intrigued by a passing reference to a homemade computer in one of the Mad Scientist Club books, and a diet of television scifi also sparked the imagination.

It was my friend Merlin who first got a computer. He and his dad had been into electronics for some time, and when Dick Smith started marketing a computer called the Wizzard (most appropriate, har har) they bought one. It was a video game console with a bunch of clones of well-known games on it (Donkey Kong became Police Jump), and also had a module you could plug-in to do some BASIC programming. (more…)