Confessions of a teenage geek



My 12th birthday in 1981 was both the most exciting and frustrating day of my childhood. After seeing an ad in the Sunday Times, my father had bought me a ZX81, the pioneering sub-£70 home microcomputer from Sinclair Research. With 1Kb of RAM and an 8K ROM that included a version of the BASIC programming language, it was the first micro to break into the mainstream. (Its £99 predecessor, the ZX80, only appealed to hardcore tech hobbyists.)

So why the frustration? Having seriously underestimated demand from parents attracted by the educational benefits, Sinclair’s mail-order operation was having trouble fulfilling sales. It was three more months before the machine finally arrived.

It was about the size of a paperback book, with a fiddly membrane keyboard. You used a TV as a monitor, and a cassette recorder to save and load programs - a  hit-and-miss affair where tape quality and record/playback volumes were critical. At the time, there was next to no packaged software and users threw themselves into Sinclair BASIC programming, sharing listings through the pages of the many computer magazines that were springing up.

The 1KB of RAM soon became a frustrating wall, and by Christmas I was begging for Sinclair’s 16Kb RAM pack, a poorly designed peripheral with a ‘wobble’ problem that caused the machine to crash if jogged (unless you wedged some folded cardboard underneath). By the end of 1982, the machines were on sale in WH Smith and a whole community of small companies had grown up to supply games, utilities and add-ons. Sinclair had also released the ZX81’s better-remembered successor, the ZX Spectrum - which boasted an improved ‘rubberised’ keyboard, 16Kb and 48Kb models, high-res graphics and colour. Competitors such as the Commodore 64 and BBC Micro were also emerging. The home computer revolution had begun. My dad, no doubt fearing ever-increasing pressure on his wallet, resisted my pleas for an upgrade.

Yet despite its idiosyncracies and frustrations, the ZX81 opened my eyes to the fact that a computer could be both a useful tool and a vehicle for my creativity.

I wrote a handful of productivity apps, including a program to test my French vocab, but my real love was creating adventure games - using my imagination to build ‘virtual worlds’ with interactive narratives. I placed a small ad in “Sinclair User” magazine seeking collaborators (the closest thing to ’social networking’ back then), and one of the appoaches was from a small publishing company, Interface. After a brief discussion at one of London’s regular ZX Microfairs, I’d agreed to co-author a book, Creating Adventure Programs on the ZX Spectrum, in return for a share of the royalties and a brand new 48Kb ZX Spectrum.

The book came out when I was 14. My dad was proud his decision to buy me the ZX81 seemed to by paying off. I only made £50 or so in royalties, but on the back of the book secured a weekly computer column in the local paper that set the course of my future career as a technology writer and commentator. By the second half of the decade I was also working regularly after school in my dad’s small East London insurance broking firm, among other things setting up and writing queries for a Paradox database on the company’s newly-acquired IBM PC. It was then I realised personal computers were going to have a fundamental impact on the workplace in the coming decade…