Micro Men

[Ardiles]

The 80's were great for us geeks, the birth of home computing for the masses. Who can forget buying a monthly computer magazine, typing in the 1000's of lines of code that they used to contain and then spending fookin' ages debugging/correcting your typos.

BBC and BBC Lite (Acorn Electron) - OK the BASIC was pretty good but lets be honest, for most of us games was what it was about.  And that was Speccy v C64. And of course the Speccy was more popular given it was cheaper, you could use a standard tape deck and games were easily copied.  But the C64 was better, obviously. Better graphically and the SID chip provided sound well in advance of its competitor.

Yoof of today, it's all graphics and generally gameplay suffers. But they'll never get the same sort of enjoyment we got from our simplistic games of yesteryear.

Many a rainy Saturday afternoon was spent like this.  I used to buy Sinclair Programs and then graduated to Crash! which was more games oriented.  Agree that it's a shame the basic (no pun intended) programming element to popular computing has been lost.

[Peter Venkman]

For the C64 ZZap64 was the mag where it was at, I still have a few, including my pic in one of them

The old magazines with the basic games were always ace, but ultimately contained so many errors they rarely worked first time typed in and then saved to the trusty C30 tape.

[THE FLASH]

ZX81 with a self made 32k ram pack for starters for me.  Off a bloke at mums work.
Mazogs and Donkey kong were my favourites.

spectrum next... 48k....combat lynx and knightlore were the kiddies and pheenix and Manic miner were good.

Lots of piracy going on....you could wang a load of games on shitty c9o tapes from the market.

Some used to take all day to load and then crash at the death!!!

[jonny72]

Did Americans use Acorns and Sinclairs or was it a British thing?

Both were a British thing. I think the Sinclairs did ok in Spain and were pirated a lot in the USSR. But in the USA it was Commodore, and Apple to a lesser degree.

[suttonred]

I rebought several early issues of Crash from Ebay a year or so back, anorak heaven. I always wished i was Kevin Toms...

[Talk Talk]

The old ZX81 was my first machine which I got for Xmas 82 (which Mr TalkTalk now owns or did own for his Computer museum)

I then went on to have a career from 84 in programming which lasted for 18 years and I would not have gone into it if I hadent got that first Sinclair ZX81 with 16k expansion pack. Sir Clive has a lot to answer for with me!

I met Sir Clive Sinclair on the Tube in 1983 and had a little chat with him, he seemed a really nice bloke but the word geek does not even come close to this man "SuperGeek" is closer.

He was wearing a Tee Shirt that just had the word "Sinclair" emblazoned accross it, which I thought a little modest at the time!

Sorry John, the ZX81 went the way of that business 

Anyway - if anyone fancies a brief sojourn into BBC B/Spectrum/ZX/VIC/PET wonderland, pop along to the Swindon Museum of Computing in Regent Circus before a match one Saturday (only open on Sat).

http://www.museum-of-computing.org.uk/index.htm

It's good for an hour or so and they have a few consoles powered up.

[spacey]

That sounds awesome! Do they have a picnic area? Do you know if I can download a risk assessment? I  wouldn't want to get injured.

[Ardiles]

Found this site last night.  I really miss the 1980s.

http://www.crashonline.org.uk/

[suttonred]

Cheers, there goes cleaning the car...