Articles: My Life As A Computer - Where It All Went Wrong My Life As A Computer - Where It All Went Wrong Computer programmers, IT experts and fans aren't born, they're made. But what makes them? What shapes maleable young minds and turns them from being undecided, wide eyed life adventurers into jaded, cynical, emotionally burned out, charred shells of mankind? Obviously I've only ever lived my life so I don't know all the answers but I do know how I reached the sad, pitiful existence that sees me typing this in an office filled with silicon based boxes of dullness, and how the computing industry has changed in that time. Here dear reader is TheNeil's tale - a combination of the life altering (computing) moments, the shifts in technology and how I saw the computing world through an idiot's eyes... The 70's - Here Comes Ambivity The 1970's were a whirlwind of awful clothes, bad music and various other aspects of popular culture that have now been, quite rightly, derided. Most importantly (to me anyway) I appeared on the face of the planet at 6:30am on a sunny June morning in 1974 (actually it may not have been sunny but I want to set a pleasant picture). Memories from this time are somewhat hazy and, truth be told, I can only really remember one thing from the 1970's - a couple of fleeting scenes from the first TV showing of Dr No in 1976. This would come back to haunt me as it would be years before I could work out where this bizarre series of images actually came from. And that was it, the 1970s. No Earth-shattering events, no calamities, and certainly nothing as bizarre as a computer. The 80's - A Decade of Turbulence TV Tennis Anyone? So to the 1980s. Again memories of this time are somewhat limited, and, aside from watching some bits of the 1980 winter Olympics (on TV, we didn't actually go) nothing really happened...until my Dad came home with a bizarre box of tricks (no, he wasn't a magician)(although he did perfect a brilliant trick whereby his hair has managed to change colour over the course of 20 years). The box of tricks in question was a Binatone TV Master MK IV. Ok so it was nothing more than a Pong variant but this thing was hot and to a young impressionable mind, fantastic. Sadly to my mind it was also far too complicated (even to this day I'm hopeless at Pong) and instead the bright orange and black plastic and the clunky slide controllers were far more impressive to play with than trying to work out the fundamentals of bouncing a white dot back and forth across the screen. In fact I can't really remember anyone actually ever trying to use it and, like so many 'wonder products', it soon found itself relegated to back of the cupboard. The one time that I can remember using it (which must have been a couple of years later) it started smoking when plugged in, so my father, in his role as 'family protector', immediately threw it in the sink and poured water over it. Sadly he'd unplugged it and, even more sadly, it was then relegated to the rubbish bin, never to be seen again. This may have sounded like something of an over-reaction but at the time computing was still an unknown to the masses. Yes many homes sported an Atari VCS (we never did by the way) but 'electrical machines' were dangerous, and had to be treated with complete and utter respect. Perhaps it was a general naivety towards everything but smoke instantly meant fire (hence the sink and water), computers meant filing cabinets and giant spools of tape, and cars (in Britain) meant rusting heaps that sported futuristic features such as a heater or two wing mirrors. Nowadays the lines between games consoles and computers have blurred (mostly because of consoles being far more powerful and PCs now being far smaller) but in 1980 a games console wasn't a computer and a computer wasn't a games console. Games consoles were the domain of 'cool kids', and 6 year old boys called Neil got excited about playing with Star Wars figures and colouring things in (oh how times have changed - Star Wars figures are long gone). A computer on the other hand was something that the man in the street had nothing to do with. This was the view in the 50's, 60's and 70's but even though the home-computing revolution was on the way, in suburban Britain Mr. and Mrs. Joe Average still viewed such things as the stuff of science-fiction. What use would a computer be? What on Earth could you do with an overgrown calculator? Computers were still the domain of big business, government departments and scientists. Yes, the 70's had introduced a section of society to the wonders of the silicon age but it was still not a part of everyday life. Office workers were starting to see mainframe terminals appearing in the workplace but at the time 'the computer' was still a thing to behold, a mythical behemoth that existed 'elsewhere' and was tended to by legions of white-coated technicians. All that had happened in the decade since the 60's was that users were now overweight, nylon-shirt clad, chain-smokers in offices rather than bespectacled, science nerds who sent spaceships far into outer space (assuming they entered the correct cryptic code). I digress though. We're Living The Dream In suburban Britain computing was a no-go area. TV show Tomorrow's World had been showing the British public the benefits of the 'modern age' for years and would keep revealing gadgets and technological breakthroughs that would make our lives forever easier and more pleasurable (and when, precisely, is this actually going to happen?). On TV it all looked so possible and, within just a couple of years, we'd all have robot butlers, self-drive cars, and be wearing tin-foil space clothes and eating pills instead of actual food. This was the world of the future. This was the world where everything would be 'push button'. This was the age of science, and the man in the street didn't need to know how it worked as a 'computer' would do all the work. This had been the vision conjured up in the minds of the British public ever since the 1950's but even in 1980 it was still a pipedream as far as the majority of the country was concerned. Yes a few pockets of resistance had broken out and a few people had managed to get onto the home computing bandwagon, but for the bulk of the nation, computing was still a closed shop and a 'technological breakthrough' to most really was a Pong machine and staring through a shop window at a video recorder (which also happened to be the size of a modest estate car). The video recorder itself was the stuff of dreams for mere mortals and, although the technology had been available since the 1960s (and possibly earlier) to Mr Man-In-The-Street it was a frivolous luxury that meant nothing. Watch films from the comfort of your own home? Why the very thought. At the time Britain may only have had 3 TV channels but they were filled with endless hours of quality entertainment and surely no-one in their right mind would need such diversions. Again though, I digress (you'll probably notice that I do that quite a lot). Outside of cosy-land things were changing though and the BBC was trying to get in on the act. The story of how the BBC ended up with its own branded computer is well known (BBC wants to do TV programme with computer tie-in, searches for affordable home computer, finds Acorn, deal is done, yadda, yadda, yadda) but this was the first real mass exposure of the nascent home computing trend. Machines like the NASCOM-1, the Apple-1 etc. were all well and good but they were still specialist machines that only appealed to specialists. While die-hard electronics fans were able to get excited about a circuit board, it wasn't 'mainstream' and the public at large needed to be educated as to the possibilities and potential of owning your very own computer. Even this would prove to be a stumbling block until home computers became practical. It was all well and good for 'Colin' to start soldering chips onto a PCB and rig up an LED display (5 coloured LEDs in a line, possibly accompanied by a row of corresponding toggle switches) but the man in the street had been informed over the years that computers were boxes that did what they were told and would be easy to use - no-one had mentioned having to have a degree in electrical engineering or having to connect 148 wires just to change the screen resolution (in fact, what the hell was 'screen resolution'?...Or even a 'screen'?). By the late 1970's the spit and chicken wire machines were being replaced with far simpler efforts that took their lead from the Pong machines: plug in the computer, connect it to the TV and start typing on the keyboard (as opposed to flicking switches). This was the level of complexity that best suited the British buying public...or, rather, the intelligent British buying public. It was this market and timeframe that the BBC eventually launched 'The Computer Program'. The programme made no impact on a young TheNeil at all but to my father (a Civil Engineer so supposedly intelligent) it was obviously far more impressive. Perhaps it had been his prior exposure to the magic of computing (1970's office environment you see - no idea about whether he wore nylon shirts though, although it's a fair bet that he did) or perhaps it was the wonders that presenter Chris Searle could demonstrate, but, whatever the reason, a genuine 'BBC micro-computer' was on its way. We Have Entered The Computing Age...ish Being seven at the time I suppose I should have been far more impressed and excited than I actually was, but this was the age when Star Wars was at its height (i.e. Return of The Jedi hadn't been released) and in 1981 I was far more concerned with defeating the Empire's AT-AT walkers with Luke Skywalker's snowspeeder than the arrival of a beige box and my father's half assed attempts at doing anything with it (or anything at all, if truth be told). It had arrived though and, like so many other buyers, our machine was the better equipped 'B' version with a full 32Kb of memory (the 'A' model only sported 16Kb of memory and couldn't do as much). Unpacking it from its brown cardboard box and polystyrene inserts I can only recall thinking "That polystyrene will be great to play with" - so much for the enthusiasm of youth. At the time, purchases like this were 'events' and everything was done in a very serious, professional manner. This wasn't fun you know, this was serious. Just like a video recorder where all of the tapes had their own cases and 'father' spent hours putting little numbers on the side of them, the 'computer' was not an item of merriment. This beige box with it's black keyboard and red function keys was 'not a toy' and was naturally treated with great respect. With its dedicated black ash effect cabinet the 'computer' was not to be touched unless you were a trained operator and I can still recall being allowed to watch my Dad use it. This, at the time, was very much indicative of the British public's attitude towards computers and it's a direct extension of the white-coated scientist view that permeated society's view of the 'automated machines'. Or maybe it was just that my Dad liked to lord it over me and was taking his turn at being the 'expert'. We had a 'BBC' though and I could tell that this meant different things to different members of the family. To me it meant not much, to my illiterate brother it meant nothing at all (he was only 3 at the time), to my father it was a status symbol ("We have a computer you know" he'd tell the neighbours whilst puffing his chest out, "Yes, a full 32 kilo-bytes of the random access memory, although I fear I shall never use all of them") and to my mother it was a bizarre, dangerous box of tricks that she'd get panicky about if it ever made a strange noise while my Dad was using it (usually this would result in covering it up with a tea-towel when he left the room). Cassette tapes were the order of the day and I can still remember the excitement as a those little hexadecimal numbers counted up while a program loaded. Oh this was excitement in the early 80's and I marveled at the sight of '09' switching over to '0A' - what manner of trickery be this father? Surely '10' should be next? I probably earned a good slap for not understanding number bases in their entirety. The squeal of tapes loading still reverberates around my head and although my Dad no doubt had good intentions, it didn't take long for him to start 'backing up' tapes for fellow users. What kind of an example is that to set for an impressionable young 8 year old (I must have had a birthday since the machine arrived)? At around this time (or not long after) a computer shop opened in the town and on any Saturday morning you could guarantee that it would be filled with kids hammering away at the latest games and not actually buying anything. The Sinclair Spectrum and the Commodore 64 were the 'big' machines of the time and the shelves were crammed with games for them, with the poor old BBC being relegated to a tiny corner filled with games that never appeared on any other platform. It's experiences like this that cloud a young mind and sadly it seems to have happened to every machine I've owned since. There were classic games though and, while not a game addict, some games still live on long in my memory, specifically Repton and Elite. In the early 80's home computing was taking off in a big way and even though I personally was somewhat apathetic towards it, my Dad kept plugging away, buying bits and pieces, swearing at the 'damn thing' and never really explaining to anyone what he was actually doing (this would be an approach that he'd stick to from then onwards..and not just confined to the realms of computing). Occasionally a computer magazine would appear and it would be filled with adverts for weird and wonderful add-ons, attachments, programs and page after page of code listings (yes, programs listed, line by line, so that saddo users could type them in). It was probably via this method of magazine advertising that we ended up with a pair of joysticks. A joystick was (and still is) a hand sized grip on a base, and there'd be a couple of buttons attached at strategic points...unless they were for a BBC (or 'Beeb' as it was now coming to be called). The Beeb's joysticks were analogue and had a giant black plastic case with a button in the front. Holding the case in one hand you used the other hand to control the tiny joystick that was attached to the top of it. Now this was something that I could understand (none of that typing in commands or using the keyboard business). Admittedly I was still crap at playing games but flight simulators and driving sims became a bit more interesting. An End To Tapes? Not Likely And so the computer had entered our home. Admittedly it didn't do half of things that we were promised it would do (my mother never did get around to having her recipe book stored onto tape) but over the next couple of years it moved from various rooms and didn't really get much use. Christmas 1985 saw a change though and although a swathe of new machines had arrived on the home computing scene and the public had embraced them far more so than in the dark years of 1981, the Beeb was still installed in the spare room and still chewing up tapes every now and then. This though was the year of the floppy disk and after having amassed a drawer full of tapes (all stored in those big racks of tapes that you can't buy anymore) our Beeb entered the disk revolution. What you have to remember about computing in the 80's was that there were very few standards about. IBM's PC was certainly on the market but it wasn't in the domain of the home user and there were still hundreds of competitors and manufacturers battling it out for dominance. This didn't just apply to the machines themselves though as each of the peripheral manufacturers were also releasing devices that were totally incompatible with each other - this is how we ended up with a 5.25" Opus DDOS floppy disk drive. To the non-technical minded you're probably thinking 'and?'. To those who are technically minded, you're probably still thinking 'and?'. In the mid-80's, Acorn were still kings of the BBC hill and what they said pretty much went and this applied to just about every aspect of the machine as well as its peripherals. Acorn had it's own floppy disk drive and it used Acorn's ADFS system (ADFS=Advanced Disk Filing System) so every disk that it read or wrote used that format. The Opus drive that we ended up with used Opus's DDOS system (DDOS=Disk Drive Operating System) and, sadly, this meant that it 'talked' to the disk differently than the Acorn 'standard'. This isn't a problem until you started to swap disks between the two systems and discovered that there were occasional 'quirks' that meant that disks weren't always able to be swapped. Bugger. The drive was a revelation though and despite weighing about half a tonne (the 5.25" disks weren't much better - they certainly couldn't be popped into a shirt pocket) it did actually do what it said on the box. This being 1985, floppy drives weren't standard (and they certainly weren't when the Beeb was designed in 1980-81) so to get the machine to accept the thing, the two of us, sharing a rare father-son moment, took off the lid and, while I marvelled at the array of chips and circuitry, my Dad's 'superior' knowledge lectured me on the rights and wrongs of doing things like this. Apparently the insides of the computer were a dangerous thing and we had to be very careful not to damage it via static discharges etc. Oh this was brain surgery of the highest kind as we had to insert a ROM chip directly into one of the Beeb's many ROM expansion slots (this chip contained the information which would allow the machine to 'talk' to the disk drive). Naturally is was not without incident and several legs on the chip got bent (causing my father to swear...in front of his own child - I have been emotionally scarred ever since). This of course was the end of the world but good old Dad soon saved the day and delicately bent the legs back by pressing them on the edge of the table (we couldn't have touched them directly as it would have fried the chip...and probably ourselves). In went the chip, everything got plugged back in and the drive did exactly what it said on the box...except that it wouldn't read disks. I often wondered precisely who the floppy drive had been for as, not only was I gifted with the drive itself, but also a stack of bought titles (yes, no shoddy knock offs here) that seemed to be of no interest to a child of 10. Being titles direct from Acorn themselves you would have expected perfection but alas no as the little drive just wouldn't read them and no amount of inserting and locking them into place (those were the days, floppy disks had to be 'locked' into place by turning a handle on the front of the drive) would solve the problem. My father wasn't overly impressed, I was biting the feet off of Ewok figures, my brother was doing God knows what, and my mother was wringing her hands and worrying that we were going to go to prison, burn down the house or something (she probably put another tea-towel over the machine but I can't confirm or deny this with any certainty). Games? It Can Play Games? The drive did work and it was in fact the software on the disks that was at fault but so far the Beeb hadn't really caught my attention. All of this would change with the influx of disks that seemed to magically appear via my father whenever word got around that there was a 'goodie' available. The first that I can remember was Repton. Repton had actually been one of the titles that had failed to load so spectacularly but the 'fixed' disks loaded without any problems and the blocky, multi-coloured maze world of the strange lizard-man caught my little imagination. Yes I'd seen and played games in the arcades (and they were far more impressive from both an audio and graphical point of view but did involve walking 25 minutes into town and then pumping 10p pieces into machines that, typically, only lived in the roughest, most child-unfriendly places ever created: seaside amusement arcades) but this was the first time that the Beeb had done anything that made me realise what it was really capable of. The fact that I hadn't had to wait about 8 weeks for the disk to load (compared to tape) was an added bonus. I didn't profess to be a genius at the game but it was fun and, even with my hopeless lack of co-ordination where a keyboard was concerned, enthralled me. It might not have rivaled the arcade machines but it suddenly seemed that the Beeb could do something better than those God awful Spectrums with their crude graphics. This then was the first spark of interest and, while it might not have had me delving into assembly language, it did draw me ever so slightly into the digital world. Being the 1980's every school soon found itself equipped with a computer and it was invariably a BBC. Despite having been available for a good 4 years, the machine was totally alien to just about everybody in the whole school and, looking back, I get the impression that the teachers viewed the machine with a mixture of total disdain and fear. Fear of not only the fact that it would spontaneously combust within 10 minutes and burn down the school (this had turned out to be a lot more common a misconception that I first realised) but also fear that they'd all be unemployed within a year and 'the computer' would be teaching the kids directly. Of course the fact that no-one (and I mean no-one) knew how to use the thing was irrelevant but it was precisely because of this that I found myself plonked in front of it by a proud teacher who wanted to show that someone in her class knew what to do. Did I? I could flick the power switch, type a few simple commands etc. but what did they expect a 10 year old to do? As this wasn't Hollywood I didn't hack into the Pentagon and threaten to destroy the world, and that was pretty much it as far as the school computer went. Occasionally there'd some big buzz when a new fantastic program came along or when an 'expert' appeared and demonstrated that computers could add up - you know the kind of thing, call out two numbers and, by entering them into the computer, it will tell you what they add up to (wow! Not only was it fast at doing this but it always seemed to get it right too - not something that I could claim at the time...or even now). The only thing that really stuck in my mind though was when some guy demonstrated a 'turtle' hooked up to the back of it. Ho hum. Although Repton had captured my interest, I still wasn't silicon mad and, despite my best friend Bob, having a succession of Spectrums (48, +2, +3) the Beeb just didn't ever come to life. Yes its graphics were better and yes it sounded better, but the Spectrum had 'fantastic' games, with specifically (for me) The Great Escape. Bob could finish it in about an hour but my pathetic brain just couldn't work out the puzzles and I just liked being able to guide my Steve McQueen type character around the prison camp avoiding the guards. I know, I'm mentally retarded but such is life. The Spectrum was the computer of the moment (in the UK) and everyone who was anyone (i.e. not me) had a Spectrum. The +2 had the built in tape drive and a 'proper' keyboard (not the rubber effort sported by the Spectrum 48), the +3 had a built in floppy drive (which used the very bizarre 3" disks and proved to be quite useful as you could swipe them from the Amstrad PCW machines at school), and then there were things with bizarre names like MultiPacks and MultiFaces that allowed you to do all sorts of bad things like 'poke' values into games (i.e. cheat). There were Kempston joysticks by the bucket load and everyone swapped games in the playground. Of course you knew that there'd be another machine along before long and to some this was hugely interesting, not to me though. Perhaps it was the fact that I hadn't been bitten by the silicon bug, or maybe it was because I wasn't in with the 'in crowd' but I was blissfully unaware of such things. Knowing that the next machine could display '64 sprites simultaneously' meant nothing to me. That's just a number - what does it mean? How does the game look because of it? Call it naive, call it simplistic, but getting excited about something that I didn't understand in the slightest just didn't do anything for me (unlike now when I get excited about all sorts of things that I don't understand - the internet, iPods, swiping hardware from work, three pin plugs...all sorts of things really). At this time machines had an aura about them and the Spectrum was no different. I didn't understand a thing about the Spectrum and didn't even want one, but I enjoyed the thought of playing games on it. To me they were pretty ugly things but the name made it 'special'. I suppose that, by comparison, the 'BBC' was a bit old and boring (especially as they were still seen as the 'educational' machine). There were other machines though and when an Oric Atmos appeared in someone's bedroom we all enthused about it (I seem to remember that it was very easy to store info what we'd now call a 'database'). Sadly the guy who owned it became a geek so we all avoided him. Like the Spectrum, the Atmos did many things and was impressive to me but my tiny brain still couldn't make the connection that the Spectrum and the Atmos were both computers and, sat at home, was computer. The inspiration just wasn't there. At Last Some Real Inspiration What did inspire me though was an advert in one of the BBC magazines that were still being occasionally drifting in via my Dad. The back page of one of them featured a glossy advert promoting the all singing, all dancing, AMX Mouse. A mouse? Why that's the stuff of dreams when all you've ever known is a keyboard and a joystick. Yes those funny Apple machines had mice and even PCs were starting to have them but on a Beeb (or, in fact, any home computer)? Looking at the full colour image of Tutankhamen that had been created (hey, now I know that it was scanned but back then I didn't) it was easy to see that this was something really special and I certainly knew what I wanted that Christmas. Thankfully Santa delivered that year and into my hot little hand fell a grey mouse with three red buttons. Another ROM chip had to be installed but, without the 'assistance' of my father (I believe he had 'things' to attend to - and no, I didn't get a new brother of sister 9 months later)(that kind of thing didn't happen, we were a respectable family with tie-back curtains and the like), it didn't cause any problems and the Graphical User Interface (GUI) came to life. Ok so it was a simple paint program with a measly palette of colours (I can't even remember if it was 4 or 16) but it was magical and I was captivated. Naturally everything that I ever created with it looked God awful but here was a virtual piece of paper that I could draw on, undo, fill, roller and deface to my heart's content. Within 6 months the plug on the end of the cable had worn out and had to be sent away for repair. I didn't care though and at 13, after having spent 6 years in the same house as it (that's nearly half my life for the mathematically challenged), the Beeb was finally capturing my attention. Old magazines were raided for their listings and many an hour was spent typing in line after line of BASIC into the Beeb's built-in programming language (not understanding what a single line of it did of course, just typing it in) and then either finding out that it didn't work, or just shutting the machine down and losing it all after running it once. That was just the way things were though and I was never happier. You Just Don't Get It Do You? I wasn't the only one who had entered the IT world though and my (still) illiterate brother landed a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Like the Atari VCS machines that had dominated the market in the late 70's and early 80's, the NES was a games console as opposed to 'proper' computer. In practical terms this meant no keyboard, no messy tapes or disks and just, what then, looked like great games. I'd never experienced a dedicated games console apart from the Binatone (and that didn't really count) and the NES was certainly far more appealing than the Beeb when it came to games. The chunky controllers, with their four way arrow on the left and the two buttons on the right, were certainly far easier than dealing with a huge keyboard, and playing the likes of Mario and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would have been nigh on impossible otherwise. Not that it made any difference as I was still useless at most games anyway. The NES was aimed squarely at kids and was the first really successful console (in the UK) since the Atari machines. In terms of quality it blew the old consoles away but to most of suburban Britain they were still considered a 'computer' as many people simply couldn't make the distinction between a black slab with a rubber keyboard and a big grey box with two hand sized controllers wired into the front of it. The market for the NES was pretty big in Britain but the bug didn't really bite in our house. Yes my brother bought a couple of games (Double Dragon stands out in my mind as one of his better selections) but it didn't really grip him and, despite playing with it a couple of times, it never really fired my imagination either. Yes the clunky feel of the thing was nice, and, in the same way as with the Binatone TV Master, the look and feel of the machine itself was probably of more interest to me than what it could actually do. As I said though, the NES had a good following in the UK and, despite competition from the Sega Master System (which was on a far more level playing field in the UK than it ever was in the US) it ended up in many a bedroom. With its chunky, cartoon-like graphics, the NES was undoubtedly aimed at the younger end of the market (while the Master System was aimed at the more 'advanced' player) and it succeeded in making kids want it...so parents naturally bought it. The cartridges couldn't be copied, which made Nintendo happy, and it stopped 'illicit' material being passed around (as was the case with tape and disk based machines). Nintendo managed to create a 'cosy' feeling that 'proper' computers couldn't match and that, naturally, made middle-Britain feel an awful lot happier. The UK embraced this new generation of games consoles but our house didn't and the NES got relegated to the back of the cupboard and then off into the big wide world (I think it got swapped for something but don't ask me what for or when). Computing For The Masses...But Not Parents Having now reached the back end of the 80's the home computer market had well and truly arrived, both in the form of the Nintendo and Sega consoles, and in more 'traditional' micro-computer. The days of roughly hewn wooden boxes housing circuit boards were long gone and, while there was still a proliferation of cables, they were all neat and tidy rubber clad efforts rather than a mass of spindly wires sprouting out of the back of a machine. Keyboards, joysticks and even mice had replaced a row of toggle switches, and glowing LEDs had been superceded (amazingly) by TVs and, if you were rich, dedicated monitors. Rather than being the specialist industry of old, home computing had now passed into the hands of the teenager and the unintelligent. Manufacturers now operated out of offices and production lines rather than from garden sheds and the image of the industry had now gained an air of responsibility. Manufacturers such as Amstrad had taken on Sinclair and released machines at ridiculous prices that made them more affordable than ever and these had been welcomed with open arms by parents who could finally shut up their complaining offspring. Naturally there were 'serious' reasons for owning a computer, but in the UK in the mid to late 80's it was all about one thing: games. Machines never touted how rows they could display in a spreadsheet but instead boasted about how many colours they could display, how many sprites they could handle, how many audio channels they had. The lines between the dedicated games consoles and the more 'traditional' computer had blurred and while the likes of Sega and Nintendo boasted far more impressive graphics and sound, Spectrums and C64s saw an explosion in games and swapping games on tapes and disks happened in every playground up and down the land (later this goodwill gesture would become cash orientated as the 'savvy' swappers tried to milk things for their own benefit). I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I, TheNeil, never traded or swapped software - no-one ever had anything or wanted anything for the beeb. Away from the teenage market, parents who had once been 'in charge' now found themselves hopelessly lost and most seemed to give up and admit defeat, more than happy for their little darlings to do what they wanted to do. A few valiantly soldiered on and tried to buy a machine to help with 'school work' but manufacturers knew that games sold machines and that's what they targeted mercilessly. The good times couldn't last though and, aside from money-grabbing school kids charging for 'backed-up' games, the glut of mediocre and sometimes downright crap games, and a wealth of different manufacturers and hardware started to claim casualties. As the decade came to a close, machines that looked destined to last forever found that it was all too easy to become yesterday's news and be forced out of the market. Some battled on but the days of the 8-bit microcomputer were coming to an end and, unless they had a red hot 16-bit games machine in the offing, manufacturers were soon closing down. The same was true of the software side of things but while firms were still closing their doors, a lot of the crap and mediocre software was now never able to make it to market. You Simply Can't Get Any Better Than This The industry (both hardware and software) was moving on but sadly I wasn't. Then again I didn't need to as I'd finally come across a genuine classic piece of software - Elite. Originally released in 1984 the game had been ported to just about every other platform but it wasn't until 1987-1988 that I found a copy in the drawer under the venerable Beeb. I assume that my Dad had been suitably impressed (and affluent) as this wasn't any cheap rip off but a bona fide, boxed version complete with novella, poster and floppy disks (making me wonder, once again, just who did he buy that floppy disk drive for?). A 3D space trading game which forced players to trade between planets, earn money, upgrade their spaceship, and destroy other ships (with the intention of increasing their combat rating until they reached the level of 'Elite') the game really pushed the frontiers of what was possible on a home computer and would go onto become one of the most loved games of all time. This though was my cosy little world and I was about to become addicted to a computer game for the very first time. With the Beeb's analogue joystick, Elite was a total dream to play and, despite its simple wireframe graphics, was just fantastic. Crammed into the miniscule 32Kb memory this was a universe and a half. Ok so I wasn't a wizard at it by any stretch of the imagination but, like Repton before it, I just liked playing it and eventually I'd end up being just one level away from 'Elite' (by this stage I'd become pretty handy and would journey into the most dangerous areas of space just so that I could take on the computer controlled ships). Bob, who'd always declined playing on my machine in favour of his 'wonderful' Spectrums, now begged that we could play Elite on the Beeb. Yes it was available on the Spectrum but the BBC version was just the very best that there was and that analogue joystick made controlling the ship magical. So we'd play together, alternating on trading runs - one manning the keyboard and one manning the joystick. Then came the advent of colour. Elite, impressive as it was, really pushed what the Beeb could do and it's display was limited to black and white. A choice 'acquisition' by my ever dependable father ('borrowed' as opposed to bought, I fear - did this man have no sense of moral guidance where his offspring were concerned?) resulted in a rather jazzy 'extension' to the machine and a world of extra Elite goodies. The Beeb had, on its underside, an array of connectors. Here you could plug in printers, drives, mice (as I knew from personal experience) but it also had gigantic connectors that allowed it to do really clever things. It was into the 'Tube' connector that we plugged in a 6502 Second Processor. The BBC's clever design allowed it to access a second processor and then share jobs between it and the original processor. So by adding the second processor the machine could do more things, and in the case of Elite this meant that it could run a more advanced version that not only sported colour wireframe graphics (oh, the splendour) but also had extra elements that hadn't been available in the older version. I won't go into total detail but let's just say that even more hours were misspent than before. Farewell Old Friend The Beeb's days were numbered though and, impressive as Elite had been, the 16-bit machines had just about totally taken over. Bob had landed an Atari ST and I marveled at its games. Yes it had some 'serious' software and really good music interface but at 15 years old you don't care about such things. The ST seemed to be streets ahead of both the Spectrum and the Beeb and, by shipping with a mouse, it really seemed to be a miracle of the modern age. With the world (excluding my good self - it wasn't that I was unimpressed, I was just unaware) having been blown away by the rise of graphical user interfaces as introduced to the mass market by Apple's Macintosh and Lisa, the ST came with its very own Tramiel Operating System (which had a rather unfortunate abbreviation). Coming from a Beeb background I should have been blown away by the ST's graphical interface but, just as the likes of Atari and Amiga had been pushing beyond the 8-bit microcomputers, so too had Acorn. I would just like to point out at this juncture, I was in no way an Acorn advocate. Yes the only machine I'd ever really used was an Acorn BBC but I would quite happily have shifted to an Amiga or an ST. My parents though were 'practical' and instead opted for a machine that could 'help with school work' and we ended up with an Acorn A3000. While most of the industry had gone for the 16-bit microprocessor, Acorn decided to try something different and went with a radical 32-bit RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Code) processor, designed specially for them (most machines at the time used a CISC, or Complex Instruction Set Code, which could do more but not as quickly - RISC processors did simple tasks but a lot quicker and, even when combined to do complex tasks, were still faster than their CISC rivals). The new processor first saw the light of day in the company's Archimedes range that was launched in 1987 and was quickly replacing the Beeb as the 'education machine' favoured by schools. Like just about every machine at the time, the 'Arc' sported a GUI (originally it didn't but Acorn introduced it soon after the machine was launched) and it was a great piece of kit with great graphics, great sound, expansion possibilities (including the ability to install a hard drive - just about unheard of for a home computer), networking, a dedicated monitor (as opposed to using a TV) and even a PC Emulator. Acorn were also savvy enough to make it backwards compatible so that all of that lovely BBC software would run on it quite happily (via emulation, but it ran none the less)(of course getting files across was more problematic but that's one for the Arc nerds). The Beeb magazines had been touting the new Archimedes machines since before they were launched and they soon started to appear in schools, and, eventually, my school. Compared to the old BBC they were great but I wasn't too bothered about changing. Yes I loved reading about it and finding out what it could do, but what was the point of actually buying one? I only ever really used the Beeb to play a couple of games, and didn't even do any real coding (although I did have a go at typing in the software listing that gave the Beeb a GUI - that was really worth three hours worth of typing to see a keyboard controlled mouse and a couple of icons that didn't do anything). The push, as before, came from dear old Papa. A 'full blown' Arc was out of the question as they came in at well over £1000 but Acorn had spotted this and released the alternative A3000 in 1989. The A3000 had the same style case as the Amiga and ST (single box, floppy drive in the side etc.) rather than the case used by the Arc which had a separate keyboard and base unit. It seemed to take an age to arrive after it was ordered but, with its dedicated monitor, the A3000 was a world away from the Beeb. The blinking white cursor on the black background was replaced with a mouse controlled 'desktop'. Yes I'd played with an Arc before at school and in shops but this was my machine (despite having to 'share' it with my (still) illiterate brother). I can still remember putting in a demo of PipeMania (from a cover disk courtesy of the Beeb mags that had all switched to supporting the newer machine long before) and being amazed by the fantastic graphics, sound and game play. Can you imagine, playing a game with a mouse! Compared to the Beeb the A3000 was a wonder. In fact compared to the ST the A3000 was a wonder. Ok so all of the software from the Beeb was out (the A3000 had a 3.5" floppy drive while the Beeb was 5.25") but the things that the machine could do were truly stunning. Oh God - He's Lost Forever The internet was still a long way off but cover disks and Public Domain libraries (where you mailed in a cheque with a list of the disk numbers you wanted, hoping that they'd send you the disks at some time in the future) opened my eyes to precisely what the machine was capable of: ModTracker (music) files sounded real compared to the Beeb's simple beeps, coding demos threw stars and solid 3D objects around all day long, ray-tracing apps took hours to run but produced amazing images. It was a quantum leap forward and here was a machine that could actually do things. Like the Beeb it sported BBC BASIC but the 'new and improved' version allowed you to do 'clever' things like create programs that ran on the desktop. Even better was the fact that by now I'd figured how to read and write programs to/from disks - it may have taken several years but all of a sudden it just clicked. I took to the new machine immediately and, despite being a family computer, it ended up in my bedroom. My Dad had given up on trying to use a computer at home (perhaps the introduction of PCs in his office had killed off any interest), my brother was too busy hiding in bushes (don't ask) and my mother was still wringing her hands and worrying about the house being burned down. Sod the lot of you, I'm off to shoot, hit, kick, or just generally maim something. Did I push that machine to its limits? Nope. Did I explore what it was capable of? Nope. Did I learn everything that there was to learn about it? Nope. Did I have a fantastic time and start actively looking for hardware and software? Yes. The A3000 may not have been the consumer hit that Acorn might have been hoping for (despite being aimed at the same Amiga and ST market, it's higher price tag and lack of games meant that it never really stood a chance which is something of a shame as it had more than enough power to do justice to games - those that it did get generally looked and sounded great) but with me it was fantastic. No longer did I just look at the pretty coloured adverts in the magazines and then wander off to do something else. Now I actively hunted down the likes of E-Type, Break 147, and even an Arc version of Elite (which wasn't actually as good as the Beeb version it has to be said). Public Domain libraries were regularly ordered from and their archives of demos, images and sounds plundered. I even took the plunge and bought a hardware sound sampler that had been built/investigated over successive issues of one of the magazines that I now subscribed to. Ok so it wasn't studio quality but the little circuit board that plugged into the back of the machine could sample sound...to me this was another item of great awe and wonder. So much did I love that machine that I managed to burn out the power supply. This proved to be problematic as Acorn dealers were few and far between and those that I did track down either wanted several hundred pounds or refused to send out a PSU to an end-user in case I blew myself up (not like now when you can buy pretty much anything). Eventually I did track down a company that would replace it for less than £100 so off it went. The disk controller chip also went the way of the dodo and despite, or possibly because of, being in a workshop for over a week I truly cherished that machine. It felt as though I was missing an arm while it was away, and there was a great hole on the desk where it should have sat. The A3000 did more than just awaken the silicon demon inside me though as it also introduced me to the 'wonderful' world of the IBM PC. The A3000, like all of the Archimedes machines, was a powerful beast for its time and this meant that it was more than capable of running an emulator at a decent speed. In these days of multi-GHz machines this is no big deal but when most machines run in the single digit-MHz range then it was something special. Acorn had released a commercial PC emulator for the Arc and my Dad had opted for a copy when he bought the A3000 (he was either very smart, very lucky or would just buy whatever the salesman was selling). Being disk based the A3000 could naturally only emulate a disk based PC but, while not being exactly blown away by the PC itself, it did allow the Acorn boxes to run PC software and this software introduced me to coding 'proper'. 10 GOTO SetProgrammer(TRUE) One of the courses that I'd opted for was Computer Studies and the college that I was attending obviously wanted to use something a little more 'accepted' than BASIC (and something a lot less advanced than ARM assembly code - cryptic commands, directly having to move memory about and no easy to use tools) and instead went for Borland's Turbo Pascal running via Acorn's PC Emulator. Pascal is, as I would discover over many years, a great language, not only for learning through but also in industry. I won't go through the pros and cons of one computing language over another but Acorn's PC Emulator running Turbo Pascal was my first serious introduction to coding. But why did Acorn bother with a PC Emulator? Obviously there was the software available but why didn't they go for an Apple emulator or an ST emulator? The answer was dominance. In the early days of the micro-computing revolution (which allowed the home computing industry to happen) there were no standards, simple as that. Anyone could release a machine and it didn't have to be compatible with anything else - in fact pretty much everything was incompatible with everything else. This didn't prove to be too much of a problem as software that was actually good enough was usually ported from one machine to other machines. Sooner or later a standard was bound to emerge but little did anyone expect the answer to come from IBM (and it certainly wasn't an altruistic act). IBM had been the major mainframe manufacturer and initially saw the microcomputer industry as being not worth bothering with. The company had been slow to react to the advent of the minicomputer in the late 60's (allowing other competitors to gain market share) and it decided that it might be worth getting on the microcomputer act early on (although apparently it put little thought into its machine and didn't think that the venture was actually going to be profitable). The likes of Apple and other small time startup companies had enjoyed the market all to themselves up until 1981 but IBM launched it's original Personal Computer (PC). Built with off-the-shelf components the IBM PC was just about laughable from a technology point of view (the Apple Macintosh design team bought one when it was released and were apparently shocked as to how bad the machine was) but it had the magic three initials printed on the outside of the case. The old adage of 'You can't go wrong with IBM' certainly seemed to strike home with buyers (especially in the US). By no means the most technically brilliant machine, and easily outdone in just about every department by other machines, the IBM PC did sell though and all of a sudden the micro-computer industry gained an air of respectability. Potential buyers who viewed home computers as the domain of wierdos and bearded geeks suddenly saw the corporate respectability of IBM on the horizon and rejoiced. No-one else did but conservative buyers are something else and businesses that were scared of spending money on products from upstart companies such as Apple were more than happy to trust 'Big Blue'. As the micro-computer industry became more cut-throat as the 80's progressed, the cost of research and development for newer and faster machines and technologies squeezed many manufacturers out of the market but the likes of IBM stayed the course and soon the decision for business buyers came down to 'PC or not PC?'. IBM had the strangle-hold...or should have. The IBM PC was not technologically brilliant and IBM's use of off-the-shelf parts meant that 'clones' should have been easy to produce but Big Blue had, what it thought, was a trump card. Having developed it's own BIOS (Basic Input/Output System - the piece of the computer that allows everything to communicate with everything else) the corporate giant felt confident that its machines could not be copied, however three engineers felt differently. Setting up a new company with the name Compaq, IBM's BIOS code was attacked, dismantled and duplicated. Legally this wasn't allowed but with some clever side-stepping and 'inventive' interpretation of the law, Compaq produced a legal set of code that was 100% compatible with the IBM system - monopoly over. Being able to produce machines that were compatible with IBM's, Compaq opened the floodgates and soon started releasing machines that were not only as good, but often better. They were also cheaper and that was what really appealed to buyers. With the 'IBM PC' name respected, potential buyers faced a question of whether to go for the more expensive IBM option or the cheaper Compaq version that could do exactly the same thing and run exactly the same software - it wasn't a difficult decision. Worse was yet to come though as where Compaq went, others followed and soon 'IBM-PC Compatibles' were springing up all over the place. The micro-computer industry had its first price war and, inadvertently, its first recognised standard. The 90's - And Now For The Serious Stuff... You Can't Battle The Big Boys By the time that Acorn had first released the Archimedes in 1987, the IBM PC had been on the market for 6 years. Yes it had been revised, improved, upgraded, copied and imitated, but it was, without doubt, the dominant machine. Machines such as the Apple II and the Commodore 64 had possibly sold more actual units, but the PC had far better market penetration and, more importantly, had been embraced by the business community. There was no stopping it now and Acorn knew that PC compatibility (albeit via emulation) would earn it major plus points in the eyes of the buying market. It wasn't just the industry that had identified the dominance of the IBM PC, as the average home user now knew the difference between 'games machines' and 'business machines'. Games machines may have originally simply included the likes of the console offerings from Nintendo and Atari but, despite the best marketing efforts in the world, the likes of the Spectrum, the ST and the Amiga were also identified primarily as games machines. Yes the sales pitch always mentioned that you do far more than just play games, but the majority of the machines sold did nothing but blast alien invaders and journey into faraway lands. 'Business machines' were a different proposition though and, in the minds of most people, they were 'serious' machines that did 'serious' tasks. The tide was starting to turn though and some, limited, games titles were starting to emerge but, to the public, the 'PC' meant business. This didn't bode well for Acorn and, even though it had market dominance, the education market started to respond to the needs of the 'real' world. With IT having now penetrated the business world in a big way, business wanted recruits who knew how to use their machines, not the machines used by education. Acorn's PC Emulator could be seen as a either a step in the right direction or a desperate last gasp attempt to stay in touch. Education buyers knew that they needed to create PC literate pupils so should they buy Acorn machines that could operate as PCs, or just buy PCs (which had now dropped in price by so much that they were considerably cheaper than Acorn's offerings)? I think we can all work out the answer to that one. No, Let's Go Portable I was happy in my little world with my A3000 but big changes were on the horizon. The 90's had reached their third year (1992) and I was about to enter the big world of university life (to study computer science - God knows why, probably because it was the thing that I was least bad at). I don't know what had inspired me but I'd set my heart on owning a laptop and, for some reason, it had to be a PC. With my 18th birthday approaching I pestered and badgered my parents until they managed to deliver the precise machine that I'd chosen. The exact process involved is lost in my bottomless pit of a memory but I'd decided that the machine for me was a Mitac 3025D laptop. I must have seen a review or a picture of it somewhere but I just knew that it was the machine for me. My parents had had to hunt around every PC supplier in the country to get hold of the exact model (how the hell was I supposed to know that it had been superceded?) but this was the machine that I'd longed for and this was the machine I got. With its 16MHz 80386 processor, a whole 1Mb of RAM, grey scale screen and built in floppy disk drive, the Mitac was a gateway into a brand new world of wonder, and, with the cosy world of the A3000 behind me, it was a world that I was keen to explore. From the Acorn PC Emulator I knew about running MS-DOS but this thing had a 40Mb hard drive (apparently my Dad had decided that it would be worth the extra cash over the standard 20Mb) and this opened up a whole swathe of possibilities. A copy of DR-DOS came my way and I was only too happy to install it and use its jazzy feature of being able to double the size of the hard disk (it didn't really, it just compressed files as it read/wrote them). This led to some head-scratching when something went wrong and the hard drive was reported as having 1.6Gb of free space (at the time hard drives went up to about 200Mb in size, a 1.6Gb (1600Mb) drive was unheard of) and, not long after, the poor thing died altogether. As it was still under warranty it was replaced but I took the opportunity to have it really increased to an actual 80Mb drive. But what can you do with such space? Microsoft's Windows 3.1 was the hot Operating System of the time and it was duly installed. Was I impressed? Compared to the MS-DOS command line it was a revelation and although, in hindsight, it was clunky and totally unreliable, it made life so easy. By this point in time though the PC wasn't purely about business and even though the high street wasn't crammed with PC suppliers, mail order sources were plentiful and I soon bought my first game: Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis. The game came in two versions (adventure and action) and I, naturally, ended up with the one that I didn't want. This was a blessing though as the adventure version was easily the better of the two and, even in monochrome and with a simple 'beep' sound system (the Mitac had no sound capabilities at all save for the internal 'beep' speaker) it just looked so much more advanced than the sideways scrolling shoot-em-ups and platform games that had been the bulk of my gaming experiences before. And yes, of course I was useless at playing it. With money burning a hole in my pocket I invested in a mouse (the Mitac had no internal pointing device at all) and even went so far as to buy a second 1Mb of memory. This, of course, cost a small fortune as memory was a high cost commodity anyway and laptop memory was usually totally bespoke (£80 for 1Mb?!?!? At today's prices you should be able to get about 1500 times as much for the same price). Like the machine itself I'd had to hunt around half of the UK to find what I needed but when it arrived I was still cautious/naive enough to follow instructions about static electricity and the like. Taking the Beeb and the A3000 apart had been a fairly easy process but a laptop was something entirely different and I was, naturally, a tad nervous. Installing the memory backwards and causing the machine to stop working didn't do much to help matters. The Beeb finally left home when I swapped it for a monochrome monitor that plugged straight into the back of the Mitac. Yes it tied me to a desk a little but the display was so much better that it was well worth it. At the time I wasn't bothered about losing my faithful old friend but now I realise the error of my ways. To rub salt into the would I shortly after spent a good percentage of my student grant buying a 14" colour monitor. There's More To Life Than Just... Life at university was providing me with plenty of other PC users to interact with and, even though the university wasn't pushing things or even using PCs in the main (they preferred Sun workstations) the nascent games industry on the PC had suddenly exploded and my Mitac was simply no longer up to the job. I agreed to trade it in for a desktop and walked away with a DX2-486 machine running at a stupid 50MHz. Windows now ran in colour and games looked fantastic. Desktop PCs also had major advantages over laptops aside from better displays and better speed. Expansion possibilities existed and I didn't have to suffer simple 'beeps' for long as a Creative Labs SoundBlaster (8-bit) found its way into the machine and the likes of X-Wing leapt into life. Although it came on a stack of floppy disks, X-Wing and it's various sequels were fantastic and, to me, were the closest that anything had gotten to the classic Elite. Of course there was also the Star Wars tie-in so I was in heaven. The original Castle Wolfenstein and even the first shareware version of Doom appeared (followed not too long afterwards by a 'backup' of the full version). The PC was now a million times better than anything that I'd seen before (oh how times would change) and even having to deal with base memory, expanded memory and extended memory didn't cause too much of a problem. Way back in the dim distant 1981, Microsoft had decided that no PC would ever have over 640K of memory - this was called 'base memory'. Then someone went over this limit and to solve the problem, the concepts of 'extended' and 'expanded' memory - although both were pretty much the same thing. Programs would need varying amounts of each of the different types of memory and juggling them became almost an art-form as you'd need to create bootable floppy disks that did load certain bits and pieces and didn't load others (in a desperate attempt to enable sound (for instance) but not use up too much memory). It was worth the effort though when you saw that LucasArts logo appearing onscreen. CD-ROM Is Music To My Ears New technology was appearing all of the time though and in the early 1990's, 'CD-ROM' was the big buzzword. Philips had introduced the CD in the mid 1980's but by the 90's the shiny silver disks were starting to be used for more than just audio. Being able to hold (then) ridiculous amounts of data, CDs allowed encyclopeadias and other media intensive applications to be developed. The race was on to get this technology into the hands of home users. The PC media had been hyping CD drives for several months but costing over £1000 at first, take-up was understandably slow. Prices started to fall though and when they went under £200 I decided to bite on the bullet. Unlike modern PCs that are built for such things, in 1994 adding a CD drive was not a simple operation. There was a dedicated card that had to be installed, a multitude of cables, driver disks and all manner of settings that had to be tweaked. CD audio was possible but that was all your machine could do - no multitasking. With my drive installed and configured all that remained was to experience the power of the CD. The 3D animations were very nice but kind of left you feeling a bit let down and most of the rash of titles released on the new format were little more than a string of video clips. All very impressive but not the great wonder that I was expecting. Things started to change though and games developers started to use the new possibilities a bit more intelligently. Games started to feature audio soundtracks, spoken words (point and click adventures were at their height at the time) and video 'cut scenes' that didn't feel as if they were just there to fill the disk up. I bought a copy of Microsoft's Cinemania 94 and was totally blown away by it (even if it did report that Christopher Lee was dead). Containing a seemingly never ending list of films, video clips, sound snippets and just about everything that I figured you would ever want to know about the movies, this was what CD-ROMs had always promised. Reality Becons...What A Let-down University threw me back into the real world for a year's worth of work experience and I got to experience a whole new style of machine: the DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) Vax. The Vax was a throwback to the 1970's and used terminals that were attached to a central machine (kind of like a mainframe but there was no way that the company would have had a mainframe so it was probably a minicomputer). The wonderful windowing envrinoment that I'd grown so used to was now gone and instead the Vax used command line text editing. It was archaic and it was slow but it was also hilariously funny at times (usually because of how cumbersome it was) and had some very advanced features. With a room filled with manuals detailing the finer points of Vax VMS and the Vax Pascal language, the system could do some very clever things (such as being able to write to specific character locations on screen - trust me, this is useful) and, with a bit of work, could be made to operate in a text-only pseudo-Windows style. Things like this were impressive. Things like the power supply on the central machine failing because the solder holding everything together had melted, weren't. As well as the 'dumb terminals', the company also had some of the very latest DEC Alpha workstation machines. These were cutting edge systems that boasted lots of memory and lots of power. Naturally they had their own GUI but they were a blessed relief after green screen text - even if it was only occasionally that I got to play with them. The DEC Alpha was the kind of high-end workstation that I'd seen on a couple of tours around various universities (although most of the universities that I'd visited seemed to favour the Silicon Graphics Indigo machine - a great piece of equipment but at £50,000, a bit out of my price range) and they could do things that the humble PC could only dream of at the time: true multi-tasking, millions of colours, real-time 3D animation. The Alphas were so powerful that they could even support several users at once, if my memory serves me. If I'm honest, the Vax system was awful. For the type of real-time work that was being done it was ideal but it was a giant leap back in terms of technology (aside from the Alphas). The command line interface was dreadful, the almost intuitive nature of Windows (by comparison) felt light-years ahead and it was such a total pig to use. Getting back to the PC each night felt like nothing on Earth. Even The Best get It Wrong Sometimes Intel had just released it's successor to the 80486 processor and, being fairly affluent at the time, I splashed out on a brand new Pentium 90. This was cutting edge at the time and promised blistering performance. I'm not exactly how much it cost at the time but it certainly put a major dent in my bank balance. The technology was so new that no-one had yet discovered that the chip couldn't actually add up properly (the famed 'Pentium Bug') but my machine never seemed to hit any problems. That's not to say that I didn't have problems, just that I didn't have problems with the processor. Just as with so many aspects of micro-computer history, there are often battles regarding standards and in the mid 1990's there was a battle royale going on regarding graphics card technology. PCs had relied on ISA slots for their expansion ever since the very early days of the machine. The ISA standard though was starting to show its age and simply couldn't provide the speed needed by modern machines, especially graphics cards. Two contenders entered the fray: VESA and PCI. Both had their pros and cons (which I won't detail here) but for a couple of years machines appeared that sported either one or the other. My Pentium-90 came equipped with VESA...or so I thought. After paying a small fortune for a red hot Orchid Kelvin graphics card, off came the lid and in went the card. Well, in went half the card as the rest of it simply didn't connect to anything. The card was definitely a VESA card and my machine was definitely VESA enabled...just a shame it didn't come with any VESA slots. This might sound stupid but although the manufacturer had opted for the VESA standard over the PCI standard, and the machine reported the fact, there simply wasn't any allowance made for the fact that anyone might be stupid enough to actually want to use the feature. I am that stupid though. So back went the card and I had to pay a whopping 20% re-stocking fee (as the card itself wasn't defective). And of course the company that made my machine didn't want to know either. Back To Books So I went back to university, bought various bits of hardware, bought another machine (with PCI and PCI slots!!!) and then gave into both the Microsoft and Borland marketing machines. The year was 1995 and, as part of my final year project, I had to develop a project, document it and present it. Faced with a choice of languages to use I wanted to create a Windows based project but couldn't be bothered with all of the C rubbish. This left just Microsoft's Visual Basic - simple to use but hardy groundbreaking or particularly speedy. Then came rumours of a brand new package from Borland that was fast, easy to use, and was built on top of my ever faithful Pascal: Delphi. In the summer of 1995, Delphi hadn't been released but by badgering one of the salesmen at Dunston Thomas (who were preparing training material for the new language) I managed to find out that Delphi was precisely what I needed and managed to get hold of a copy. Later Delphi was available through the university at a cut-price discount rate for students and I did get a bona fide copy, as well as buying Delphi 2 through the same scheme. Delphi was like lightning and it allowed me to create Windows 3.1 applications without any fuss, wasted time or too much head scratching. Of course at the time, Windows 3.1 was about to become old hat. Microsoft launched its all new Operating System (Windows 95) in 1995 and, like a sucker, I bought into it. At first I tried to resist but after a couple of days I relented and bought the Windows 95 upgrade pack. My Pentium-90 was no longer cutting edge but it was enough to use the new OS and suddenly everything seemed so strange again. The start button and task bar were totally alien to a Windows 3.1 user and it took a couple of weeks for everything to fall into place and for me to feel totally comfortable with it. Even worse was that the greyscale hand scanner that I'd acquired just didn't want to play ball anymore. Hand scanners were all the rage in the early to mid 90's and only high end users needed the power of a flatbed scanner. Big scans needed to be stitched together manually and you could guarantee that no matter how careful you were, two scans would never line up properly. Fortunately Windows 95 was something of a con and, rather than being a new Operating System, was partly a kludge of existing technology and still had huge elements of MS-DOS lurking about so gaining access to old MS-DOS based applications and games was very easy. University had opened my eyes to lots of new machines, ideas and technologies: The venerable 68000 processor (as used in the Amiga and the ST) had been examined and developed for (in a simplistic way), the Sun workstation had been my work environment for Pascal, Lisp, C and Pop-11 and a wealth of other languages that didn't exist in the real world, the Vax and DEC Alphas had shown the kind of extremes that existed in the real world, the PC had been my portal into the less than impressive internet (although was still early days so...). I'd learned about artificial intelligence (assuming that artificial intelligence involved filling jugs with water, and other pointless activities - we never did get around to developing a system that would assume control of the entire word and turn mankind into slaves), Boolean logic, Gausian elimination (and other mathematical concepts that I've never used since), compilers, interfaces, databases, hardware design, software design, methodologies, theories, concepts and a million other facts and figures that all stemmed from the magic numbers 1 and 0. Looking back, most of it was totally useless and either never came up again or was so hopelessly out of touch with the real world that it all needed to be re-learned anyway, but there were some standout moments. An afternoon being taught about the concepts of quantum computing and the fundamentals of quantum mechanics was riveting to me (in a nutshell and as far as quantum computing went at the time, a switch is either on (1) or off (0) unless you're dealing with quantum physics when the switch can either be on, off, on AND off, neither on or off, all, or any combination, of the following (at once), or the switch itself can have become bored and' tunneled' its way out to freedom). Ok so it didn't quite make up for having to spend 3 months being taught about the use of hexadecimal but it was something. Introducing the concept of multi-dimensional arrays into a discussion when everyone else was struggling with a single dimension array really did sort the wheat from the chaff (an array can be thought of as a bunch of items. A single dimensional array is like a list of items, a 2 dimensional array is like a table, a 3 dimensional array is like a Rubic's cube of items where each 'block' in the cube is an item - now visualise a 7 dimension array). There were also events outside of university that opened my eyes. As my Dad worked for the local council I'd sometimes visit and on one occasion was pointed in the direction of an amber terminal. The terminal was hooked up to the county's mainframe machine and, after everything that's ever been heard about mainframes, this thing should have been able to launch rockets, calculate the weather, solve world famine and compute numbers beyond the scope of human imagination...all in the blink of an eye. Sadly it was total letdown as the text-only display was little more than a data-entry screen. Where's the fun in that? How am I supposed to get filing cabinets filled with spools of tape to come to life? How do I get rows of lights to blink on and off madly? Why don't the streetlights dim when I push this thing and it starts draining power from the national grid? Where's the top secret folder with a program called 'Global Nuclear-War' in it? Suffice to say, I was less than impressed and when an advert came up in the local paper advertising a 'mainframe' for £50 (I kid you not) I made polite enquiries but decided against it. During this time my beloved A3000 also beeped its last beep as, in an attempt to get some much needed cash to finance a Canon bubble-jet printer, I had to part with it. The guy who bought it looked totally baffled but, after removing a few, ahem, 'choice' disks and settling on a price of £180, I sent him on his way and didn't hear from him or the little machine ever again. Stand Aside Idiots, I Am Here And then to work. With university behind me I had to set out into the real world and make my fortune. Joining a small firm near Cambridge I honed my Delphi skills and complained mightily when anyone got a newer machine than mine (hey, I was the programmer and therefore I had to have the best machine). My own machine was upgraded time and time again and occasionally something brand new would and special come along. One of the new rewriteable CD drives came my way (via a nefarious contact) and, just like my first CD-ROM drive, needed much tweaking and installation before it would happily create CDs. Video editing was new on the PC block so I landed a Matrox Mystique graphics card and bought the video capture extras that went with it. Editing video was a fun thing to do once or twice, or if I came up with a project that needed it but otherwise the card did very little except act as a status symbol (yes, things like this really do help to impress girls...I wish). Oh God, TheNeil Is Truly Born The internet had been the buzzword for several years by now but I'd pretty much ignored it. While others had added modems to their machines, the 'net just hadn't interested me. At university it had been available but its use was minimal and seemed to be more of an academic project rather than a practical tool - how short-sighted could I be? In the intervening years the 'net had grown considerably and although my company only had a single modem phone line (after buying a whole new phone system and not bothering to check what it could do when it came to modems - they were only a software publisher after all) I slowly started to see the appeal. Old TV shows that had long since disappeared, useless trivia, movie information - the internet had it all. Sadly everything was being run through AOL but I was hooked and quickly added a 56K Modem to my own machine. Even in the early(ish) days of the 'net AOL was not the provider of choice and I opted for Freeserve. Dial-up connections were the best that was on offer but even they required a monthly fee and Freeserve was one of the first that offered a 'Pay As You Go' service, and I was more than happy to go with this. It was also at this point that I had to decide upon a name. Never before had such a problem been presented to me as I'd simply been who I was. But now Freeserve demanded that I identified myself to the online community. Hmm. 'Deathstalker'? Nah, too cliche'd. 'nsh48179'? Too cryptic. 'CambridgeGuy'? Too desperate (sounds far too much like a lonely hearts column). It needed to epitomise my greatness but at the same time not sound too pretencious or nerdy. I figured that 'God' was a little over the top so instead rationalised that, as I was truly unique (believe me, I prey to God that there isn't someone else equally cursed, deformed or deranged as myself) I could put myself into the same category of uniqueness as The Queen, The Pope, or The Tarby. And so 'The Neil' was born but as Freeserve didn't allow spaces in user names it became simply TheNeil. And a legend was born (or so I wish - those girls who were supposed to be impressed by CD writers never did turn up). As with all users at the time, at first everything was strict: You stayed online for only as long as you needed to (this was costing money after all) and didn't download things unless they were absolutely essential. Then you reached week 2 and found that you were online for hours at a time and were downloading an endless stream of rubbish. In 1997 though the internet was a fresh faced age of innocence. Viruses were happily ignored, Spam simply didn't exist, nobody went looking for security issues and hacked your machine, and chat rooms were still safe places to visit. Chat rooms proved to be my own personal downfall and, devoid of any actual friends, I happily whiled away the hours chatting to total strangers. At that time though everything was innocent. In this age of the internet being seen as the domain of the peadophile and the pervert it's difficult to believe, but the cynics and the perverts hadn't caught onto the internet in a big way at that time and it was just a fun thing to do. Like home computing in the early days, the internet started life as more of a hobby industry and it wasn't until the back end of the 1990's that big business started to acknowledge and then dominate the internet. When I started using it, the internet was a library, an information resource, a meeting place, an idealistic utopia where you could learn new things and share knowledge. Now though it's become a shopping mall filled with all manner of ways to part you from your money. The public at first ignored the 'information superhighway' in much the same way that they'd ignored micro-computers but slowly it's use started to spread outside of just the academic and the truly geeky. Fuelled by media scare-mongering as to the 'evils of the internet' many came to regard it as a place of devil-worship and pornography but, the more people started to see through the media hype, the more people came to use and understand what it was capable of being used for. Don't get me wrong, there's an awful lot of dross and rubbish out there and the internet is not the cosy, safe little world of old. It's come of age (to a certain degree) and care needs to be taken but this applies to just about everything so what can you do. Sensing that people were starting to accept this new technology, the media started to do an about face and suddenly everything was 'internet, internet, internet'. The 'net would do everything for us and if you didn't get 'online' then you'd be left behind. What? You don't buy your groceries online? You don't order pizza over the 'net? You go outside and buy things in shops? Even the government tried to get in on the act and started promoting the internet to anyone and everyone. One Becomes Two Away from all this cynicism and analysis though, I do owe the internet big time. Not only does it do everything that's already been mentioned but it also brought Mrs Neil into my life. While it may be easier to buy a Thai bride, I met Mrs Neil through a chat room and we agreed to have a day out (as friends). Things went well, she moved in, we got married etc. etc. etc. This was how the internet was at the end of the 20th century - safer. We're not the only couple to meet online and nowadays it's not a big thing but when the internet was new, everybody who wasn't online sneered at anyone who met their partner over the internet. That perception supplied by the media made everyone who wasn't online assume that everyone who was online was a desperate loser who had retreated back from the world and was far too ugly and/or overweight to be seen outside. Of course none of this matters now as the Millennium Bug was about to wreck havoc on the world and spell the end of all mankind. The 00's - A Stupid Name (Always Has Been) We're Doomed, Doomed Early in the days of computing, when memory was expensive, some bright spark realised that it was pointless to store the year as four digits (e.g. 1972) when you could get away with storing just two (e.g. 72). This was fine and everybody accepted it and would have continued being fine if computing wasn't about to enter a new century, thereby causing a change to a third digit. Even as late as the 1980's computer designers were safe using a two digit year but little did they realise that time was slowly running out. But what would the consequences be? The media, pouncing on a few statements from the IT industry, would have had us believe that computers thinking that it was 1900 rather than 2000 some how spelled the end of the world: Planes would fall from the skies, toasters would self-destruct, video recorders would spew forth sulphuric acid, and etc. Being technologically aware, the government instigated a campaign to raise awareness and Britain, as a whole, held its breath as 1999 clicked into 2000. And guess what happened...nothing (or, very little): Planes stayed in the skies, toasters were fine, video recorders didn't spew forth sulphuric acid, and etc. The effects of the Millennium bug were, as you may have gathered, grossly over-exaggerated and the scare stories that 'everything with a micro-chip in it' would go wrong were about as far off the mark as it's possible to be. Not that the situation was bad news for everybody. In the lead up to 31st December 1999 a burgeoning industry sprang up offering to check that PCs were safe from this life threatening problem and, for a fee, would fix the problem. To assuage my parents I bought them a piece of software that fixed their PC. For my own machine I didn't bother. What was annoying was that this level of shortsightedness had already been demonstrated by none other than Apple (the Apple Lisa was designed so that its clock won't go past 1995 as its engineers figured that no-one would still be using the machine 20 years after it was released - there's faith for you). I digress though. Oh The Power...But What To Do With It? Since getting my PC online, myself and Mrs Neil had relocated to Harrogate and I'd discovered the delights of online auctions (primarily through Yahoo auctions and then through eBay when Yahoo auctions closed down). Online auctions were fantastic as you could buy pretty much anything. A rare piece of hardware, an imported games console, comics, books, DVDs - it was all there. So too was a Silicon Graphics section. Silicon Graphics machines (aka SGi) had been the big high-end machines of the 1990's and I'd seen them demonstrated in many of the universities that I'd been shown around when I'd been deciding which one to spend 4 years studying at. As it had eventually turned out, Teesside, where I ended up, either didn't have SGi machines or didn't allow the computer science students to access them but I never forgot the power and styling that had wowwed me in the past. The SGi machines were, by comparison to everything else I'd ever seen, beautiful. Cast in bright, bold colours they were not only a joy to look at but they also had power aplenty. SGi machines had been the machine of choice for high-end users in the early 1990's and, despite having never been heard of by most people, their power had been seen by a far wider audience. The SGi had been responsible for the effects in some of the biggest blockbuster movies of the decade and they threw open the door for computer generated image (CGI) effects. Terminator 2 became to life through the SGi and the machine would go on to be a movie effects industry favourite. Of course this power came at a cost...a cost that my measly student grant was nowhere near. Time had moved on though, and the powerhouse machines of yesteryear were, by now, hopelessly outpowered and little more than worthless junk. You can probably guess where this is going but what the hell. Originally costing $50,000 I paid the princely sum of £60 for my very own Silicon Graphics Indigo. But what to do with it? Actually not very much as, being a remnant of the past, it didn't use 'standard' parts and I found myself without keyboard, mouse or monitor - not exactly a great start. It did whirr into life, make a couple of beeps and flash a little green light though so it wasn't a complete loss. The spark had been ignited and a rather more complete Indigo II landed itself on my desk not long afterwards (with a considerable 'thump' it has to be said as it came with a 21" monitor). Although I'd paid a lot more for the Indigo II than for the Indigo (£425 as opposed to £60 - but the Indigo II had been a 'mere' $24,000 when new, compared to the Indigo's $50,000 price tag) I had made sure that it came with a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. It may have been the super-computer of its day but compared to 'modern' machines, the Indigo II had not aged well. Its GUI was good but lacked flashiness and the machine's performance and speed, although blistering 10 years earlier, now felt pedestrian. So what could you do with an outdated machine that had a limited market to begin with? Finding parts was always going to be a challenge and, aside from adding some extra memory, there was nothing available that was even remotely reasonably priced. Software proved to be even worse as, if it wasn't free to download from the internet, then it just didn't exist. The dreams of creating cinema quality special effects went up in smoke (although, to be honest, I can't really see it being of much use outside of the movie industry) and, despite managing to transfer files back and forth from the PC, the Indigo II just sat in the corner taking up desk space and making the floorboards groan. I, being me, didn't do things by halves though and talked of nothing else solidly for a couple of weeks and even went so far as to buy a second SGi machine (an Indy). Again this didn't really fire my excitement and the same dearth of hardware and software soon drew a close on that particular chapter. Maybe the dreams of childhood are simply destined to become the disappointments of adulthood. There's Another Way [cue big eyes and long looks towards heaven]? After dabbling with Acorn machines early on and having satiated my lust for SGi machines, I'd ended up as just another PC user. The PC was the big winner in the micro-computer hardware stakes and, with market dominance both at home and in business, it was only natural that this is where I should end up. But there was one other company that had managed to keep going through the turbulent times of 80's and 90's. In fact this company had been in on the home computing act long before 'Big Blue' and its 'PC' were on the scene. From humble beginnings working out of a bedroom and then a garage, two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) had founded arguably the most colourful computer company ever: Apple (actually there was a third founder but he pulled out very early on and I don't want to sound nerdy). There had always been a rivalry between PC users and Apple users. Actually 'rivalry' is something of an understatement - 'war' is a better word. As an advocate of the PC (and Windows) the Apple Macintosh was the 'enemy'. The Mac was backwards, slow, cruddy, incompatible and the domain of art types. I'd only ever used one once and it wasn't a pleasant experience as a user had wanted a floppy disk retrieving from his Mac. I was flummoxed as Macs, unlike PCs, didn't have eject buttons so I didn't have the faintest idea what to do (now they don't even have floppy disk but that's a story for another day). It was safe to say that I wasn't mightily impressed with the efforts of the Cupertino boys. I'd torn part of my knee up and was having to spend a week off work so maybe it was the boredom or maybe it was an Ibuprofen overdose but I ended up buying an Apple Macintosh SE/30 for the princely sum of £50. Like the original Apple Mac, the SE/30 was an all-in-one machine with a little black and white 9" screen, a keyboard and mouse, a single 3.5" disk drive and bags of personality. Taken by the cuteness of the little thing (even the chip out of one of the corners added by the Post Office didn't matter and only added to its charm) it was christened Tiny Mac (as that's what it was) and it proved to be the ideal starter machine. Coming with a 40Mb internal hard drive, the machine could boot all on its own and I wouldn't have to worry about getting Macintosh floppy disks. Despite being black and white, despite being nearly 15 years old, and despite the fact that it was totally alien to a PC user, that little Macintosh was a joy. From the first tentative power up (where it 'binged' and booted first time) it was suddenly so easy. The Macintosh Operating System (Mac OS) had been designed to be intuitive and, even with my Windows habits, it was very easy to figure out (by the way, floppy disks could be ejected either by using the Eject command or by dragging the disks to the trash can - so I conquered that demon if nothing else). And then my Tiny Mac crashed. A hard drive failure may not sound like an ideal starting point for a PC user but, in fact, it was the best thing that could have happened. I'd already grown attached to the little beige box and now it needed my help to get better. The internet that I'd grown to understand and navigate was surfed, explored, delved into and used to find out what I needed to do. Step 1: download the Mac OS disks (available free from Apple). Step 2: Create a boot disk. How do you do that with only a PC? Ask the internet, that's how. Step 3: Boot the Mac with the new boot disk. Step 4: ...Well you get the idea. Tiny Mac had something that PC most certainly didn't: soul. Even with its 24 bit 1024x768 display, P3-750 processor, 16 bit stereo sound, limitless (by comparison) hard drive space, CD ROMs, video capture, and everything else, the PC just felt like a tool while the Mac felt like a happy little adventure. The PC sat there while the Mac begged you to play with it. You'd explore and find things which, in turn, would encourage you to explore and find other things. I'm not saying that the PC is a bad machine (as it isn't) but it's not without its faults. Similarly I'm not saying that the Mac is perfect, as it isn't. The Mac just had, for me, that little extra something. Having been almost one of the pioneers of micro-computers, Apple introduced much that has greatly influenced the way that the computer is come to be viewed. The Lisa and Macintosh brought the graphical user interface to the masses (Apple may not have had the original idea but they certainly expanded on it and made it a saleable commodity) but, to the public, Apple machines have always been perceived as 'niche'. While the PC gained dominance through the 80's and 90's, Apple machines were never able to match them in terms of price or sales. Before the introduction of the iMac the man in the street could almost be forgiven for assuming that the company had in fact disappeared. In business the Mac was well known but it's relatively high cost meant that it's use was limited to designers and graphical users - tasks that the Mac easily outperformed the PC at. Apple needed something special to re-launch itself and capture the public's interest. The result was the iMac with its brightly coloured case that was a world away from the beige boxes that typified computers. As a PC user even I begrudging admitted that iMac looked good but what use was it? It couldn't run PC programs and Mac hardware and software was always far more expensive and difficult to get hold of. While I was at the rather extreme end of the PC vs. Mac 'war', the buying public looked at it a little bit simplistically: Apple=Expensive, PC=Cheap. To the non-informed it wasn't not much of a problem. Face It Son - You're An Addict But I'd entered the Mac world and I was having great fun. In fact I was having so much fun that I decided to buy another Mac. And then another. And another. And another. And... Let's just say that I turned into something of a Mac fanatic. My love of the little beige boxes was (and still is) strange though as, although the later model Macs were more powerful and more stylish, it was the older beige machines that attracted me. Like the NES and the Binatone TV Master, I wasn't overly bothered about what the clever electronics inside could do but rather what the machine itself was physically like. A Mac was (and is) typically made of chunky plastic (rather than big metal plates) and this gave it a tactile feel that you just didn't get with a PC. But I was also quite happy to strip the machine down, delve around inside its innards and upgrade, repair and refurbish when called to. As you may be able to tell from the tense that crept in slightly, I'm a Mac fanatic to this day. So I'd bought a couple of Macs and was quite happy to run them alongside my PC. The British public had, by now, accepted the PC into its home and the majority had gotten over the fear that they had of computers (my mother had stopped covering machines up with tea-towels and worrying that the house was going to burn down - she even ended up with a laptop so that she could send email and browse 'tinternet). The market had come down to a choice of only two technologies (Apple or PC) and cut-price PCs were available seemingly everywhere. Once upon a time computers could only be bought directly from a man in his shed. As the industry started to grow, mail order companies appeared and buyers could browse the adverts in the various magazines, send off their cheques and hope that sometime in the future a new piece of unintelligible hardware or software would magically appear. With the original wealth of machines available, mail order was the ideal way forward as the chances of every town having a dedicated Dragon dealer (for example) or a specialist Oric repair centre were pretty remote. Big Business Muscles In As the 80's progressed and the split between 'business' and 'games' started to appear, little shops started to appear that seemed to sell everything that a 10 year old games fan could ever hope for. Where we lived the little computer shop (originally called 'The Multi-Coloured Micro Shop' and then renamed 'Chips') was a haven for the computer obsessed. These kinds of shops, while seeming to be the entire IT industry under one roof, usually specialised in just the most popular machines: the Spectrum, the Commodore 64, the Amiga, the ST. There'd usually be a small shelf or corner where 'other' machines were catered for but, despite their initial outward appearance, these little shops focused almost exclusively on the games end of the market. Is that a bad thing? It was what sold machines and it was where the bulk of the money was at the time. In the public's eye these little computer shops were the face of home-computing and if all they sold were Spectrums and Commodores then they must be the best machines. Of course we didn't have a Spectrum, a Commodore or anything even remotely fashionable. Occasionally Chips would stock a BBC or Electron game (the Electron was kind of a cut-down Beeb and the pair could usually run each other's software) but on a weekend you almost had to literally fight your way through a crowd of eager young gamers who were all intent on having a free go on the likes of Paperboy or R-Type. For the less popular machines, mail order remained the most popular (and easiest) method of getting what you wanted. It also added an element of risk as you never knew if a) You'd get what you actually wanted, b) What you wanted was what you thought you wanted, or c) The company would go bust before they managed to send out what you wanted. In the fledgling years of the industry the manufacturer was usually the sole supplier and, while this would change in later years, it gave everything a kind of 'cottage industry' feel that ended up making everything feel a lot more warm and welcoming. I can remember spending many an afternoon phoning companies trying to track down a part or game. I think that this was actually part of the fun of buying and owning a computer. You didn't buy a package, you built one. Modern machines come with everything in the box and if you do ever need to add anything then it's all very easy to do. This is, in many ways, better but it makes your computer feel less personal. The Beeb that we had was added to and upgraded over many years and it felt as if it was a product made by me and my Dad - an off-the-shelf 'package' comes with everything and just works straight away. Where's the fun in that? The little computer shops did a great job of raising the profile of home-computing and turned it from being a science project into something that was far more acceptable to the public at large. Of course it couldn't last and big business soon got in on the act in the UK market. Most high street electrical stores started to stock a range of peripherals and then even a couple of machines. As the PC's dominance took hold, the little computer shops were not only being squeezed by the high street chains, but also found that they were dealing more and more with PCs instead of the likes of Spectrums and Commodores. Eventually big business would take things even further though and the creation of dedicated 'superstores' such as PC World (in the UK - the likes of Silicon City in the US) would become the dominant image in the public's eye. Even the mail order companies became different and the little operations run by one man and his wife were replaced by bigger companies that offered more products, better prices and (supposedly) better service. Was it better? In the public's eyes, yes it was as the general view of the man in the street was that it was far better to buy from a big organisation (possibly one complete with little name badges and fancy displays) than it was to buy from a one off shop. This is sadly something of a shame as while the big companies can now offer better prices, they don't always offer better value. The PC has become such a component driven machine that almost anybody can build their own machine. While the likes of PC World will churn out 1,000 identical machines and sell buyers a 'generic' system that includes everything that they could ever want(?), a 'little shop' will tailor make a machine and sell only what's needed. A T-Shirt printing package will allow T-Shirts to be made but is it actually ever going to be used? The bundled scanner/fax/printer will do everything that a home office will ever need to, but do most buyers even have a home office? The Future? Do We Even Have One? A home computer in the early part of the 21st century means a PC and, regardless of actual manufacturer, it's just about guaranteed to be compatible with every other PC (again, regardless of manufacturer). Is this a good thing or a bad thing? In some ways it's good - in some ways it's bad. Sometimes though I hanker for those days when every manufacturer had their own machine, when a machine lasted you 10 years instead of 10 minutes, when finding parts meant phoning the far flung corners of the world. Maybe that's why I like my older Macs - the parts aren't readily available and therefore do need hunting down. The micro-computer has undergone major overhauls in the past quarter of a century. It's changed from being a garden shed industry into a multi-billion dollar market dominated by just one standard running (mainly) just one type of software. The British public has accepted the computer with open arms and is far less intimidated than it was 20 years ago. Has the challenge gone? Has the fun gone? Has the excitement and sense of innocence gone? Chips hasn't gone and is still selling games in the tiny town where I grew up (although they now sell games consoles only). PCs (i.e. modern micro-computers) don't hold the magic for me that they once did. The sense of wonder and excitement has gone and a PC is now just a tool that I have to work with. I do still get excited when a new piece of kit turns up at the office but I'm far more likely to be interested when it doesn't have a 'Designed For Windows XP' sticker on the front of it. This was certainly the case when my father in law experienced a problem with his PC. "Bring it around and I'll get it fixed" I naively said, little realising that he owned the original IBM PC, complete with technology that was outdated even for the stone-age PC market. Complete with 5.25" disk drives and a 10Mb hard disk (which was totally no-standard I would like to point out) I had to admit defeat and he dragged it away with him. What I wouldn't give to get my hands on that again. And where next for the home-computing industry? Processor giant Intel has already hit the end of the line in terms of speed and the new push is towards multiple-CPU machines, more energy efficient processors, and, quieter, cooler running machines. The home computer is no longer stuck in a bedroom or a study but is instead being promoted as the 'digital hub' around which entire lives will revolve. The computer is now more than just a beige box that sits in the corner and plays the occasional game, and has moved into the living room (hence the need for quieter machines). Now the computer is supposed to form the centre-piece of our media system, it's supposed to be our eyes and ears onto the world, and it's supposed to make our lives far easier. The computer, as has been promised by the 'clever people' ever since the 1950's, will organise things for us, free us from the daily grind of life, and give us far more opportunities to do exactly what we want to, when we want to, and in whatever colour we want to do it in. If the industry analysts and crystal-ball viewers are to be believed, every home will be structured around a central PC which will be running Microsoft Windows (or a variant of it). The computer will provide music, video and almost every form of entertainment you could possibly hope for; you'll be able to video-phone friends and family; wireless networking will allow you to have a PDA with you at all times so that you can access the services provided by the computer. The internet will be a window onto the world and through it you'll be able to run your entire life, shop for everything, handle your finances, book holidays and never actually have to leave the house (which begs the question, why would you need to book a holiday if you never go out?). To the man in the street though, is this the reality or are the industry pundits and IT companies, as per usual, totally off the mark? While it's true that processors have hit a brick wall in terms of speed (unless you start going down the route of massive cooling systems) does anyone really need 4GHz of performance? Does the average man in the street even understand what this means? Times have changed and with it the gap between those in the know and those not in the know has widened. The explosion in technology and the speed at which the industry now moves (ever motivating companies to be the industry driving force and market leader) has resulted in an ever-widening gap between what the industry knows and what the man in the street knows. The Future's Bright, The Future's The Past The home-computer industry has changed enormously since its first stumbling steps. The days of seemingly hundreds of different machines and standards is now long gone with the IBM PC, and all of its various clones and imitators, having won the war. Apple still soldiers on, and, with its brand new Mac-in-a-box (the Mac Mini), may be able to make some inroads into the PC's market dominance (but only time will tell). The 'standardising' of the industry and the marketplace has improved many things for the home computer enthusiast but, to the me, nothing can ever hold a candle to shooting Thargoid invaders and flying around a wireframe galaxy in my Cobra Mark III spaceship. The retro home-computer market has grown enormously in recent years and, while most 'modern users' won't be able to grasp the charms and pleasures of such an endeavour, those of us who grew up with BBCs, Spectrums and Commodores can relive those mis-spent youths all over again, either through actual hardware or through the hard work of dedicated fans and the miracle of emulation. Acorn (amongst others) may have released emulators in the past but at the current time, emulators exist for just about every home-computer ever made (well, certainly the common machines). Whether it's duplicating actual arcade machines through the likes of MAME, or focusing on one specific machine, the emulation culture is alive and well. It was because of the work of dedicated fans that I'm now able to relive those 1.8MHz 32Kb BBC Micro days on my 2.8GHz 1Gb works PC (to put this into English, the PC has 32,768 as much memory as the BBC and runs a mere 1,555 times faster - that's where 24 years of technology gets you). The BeebEm emulator (Note: Other emulators are available but this is the one that did it for me) not only allows me to scratch my head and desperately try to remember which commands to type in, but I can now journey back into the Elite universe, push rocks around in Repton and remember the days when everything was new and, more importantly, fun. The internet has made emulators like this possible but it actually offers far more. The online wealth of knowledge about the 'good old days' re-introduced me to games and titles that I'd totally forgotten about. Icarus, Clogger, White Knight and seemingly hundreds of other titles that either brought back warm memories or shocked me that they'd actually been released and I just didn't know about them at all. With their arcane graphics, pitiful beeps, and clumsy interfaces and controls, things like this should be long dead and buried but, to me anyway, it's far more fun to wander the maze of Citadel than crash through the fully rendered 3D world of Half-Life, driving a blocky car in Overdrive beats Project Gotham City by miles, and flying through the wireframe splendour of the original Star Wars is so much simpler than flying an ultra-realistic recreation of an Airbus 320. Not that everything is brilliant, AcornSoft's JCB Digger still sucks to this day (in my opinion) and the likes of Winter Olympiad are still a fast track way to arthritis. Sitting in my open-plan office with the rain splattering on the window and the incessant whirr of a hundred PCs in the background, it really does make me yearn for the times when all I had to worry about was what sort of disk drive to buy, what was for tea, and whether I'd be able to reach the next level of whatever game was flavour of the month. The magic and sparkle of computing has gone for me, but at least I can still fire up BeebEm, feast my eyes on a whole 16 colours (at once), listen to a beeped rendition of the Blue Danube, and remember the days when 32Kb of memory was a lot, boffins demanded respect and playing with computers was actually fun. Acorn A3000: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=697 Acorn Archimedes: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=75 Acorn Electron: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=79 Amstrad PCW: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=189 Apple 1: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=67 Apple iMac: www.lowendmac.com/imacs/2001-700.html Apple Lisa: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=265 Apple Macintosh SE/30: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=162 Atari ST: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=20 Atari VCS: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=2&c=878 BBC Model B: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=29 BeebEm: www.mikebuk.dsl.pipex.com/beebem/index.html Binatione TV Master IV: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=3&c=1035 Commodore 64: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=98 Commodore Amiga: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=65 DEC Alpha: www.alphant.com/articles/SlashersAlphaAnalysis.html DEC Vax: williambader.com/museum/vax/vaxhistory.html Dragon 32: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=117 Elite: www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/bbc/ IBM PC: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=274 MAME: www.MAME.net NASCOM 1: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=814 Nintendo NES: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=2&c=866 Oric Atmos: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=79 Sega Master System: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=2&c=840 Silicon Graphics Indigo: www.retrobeep.com/computers/general/siliconGraphicsIndigo.htm Silicon Grahics Indigo 2: www.obsolyte.com/sgi_indigo2/ Sinclair ZX Spectrum: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=67 Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=221 Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=222

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