The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air.
I was 11-years-old when I got my first computer. Generously given to me by my maternal grand-father who was and still is himself something of a computer geek. It was an Amstrad CPC464 with a built-in tape deck and a green monochrome screen.
It had 4MHz and with 64K’s of RAM. I had no idea what the hell that meant, but I was overjoyed by having something as mindblowingly cool as a computer! I mean you have to consider that at this time in my life most of my creative energy went into circumventing the alotted cartoon-time pr. day by drawing up complex schedules for when to turn the TV on and off so that I would catch all of He-Man, GI Joe and that strange show with the rich kids who surfed and partied all the time…
I became a member of the local computer club and faithfully dragged the thing (which had no name, a tradition that I haven’t started using until rather late in my nerd life) back and forth every thursday. This was waaay before modems were even considered a possibility. I hadn’t even considered the idea of sending data down the phone pipe. With no networking of any kind, not even a simple parallel or serial cable to help us, most copying of games and programs (Bruce Lee and Harrier Attack!) was done using a standard tape recorder with a high-speed function on it. Sometimes it worked… Mostly not.
Probably about 8 – 12 months later I got my hands on an external disc drive which was just impossibly fast. I would marvel at how fast it was by loading up games from the tape deck, reset the machine and load them up from the disc drive and then compare the times… I wasn’t the smartest of kids.
Eventually I managed to get a new machine with the disc drive integrated instead of the tape deck, the CPC664. It was a lot sleaker than the one with the tape deck and the keys were colored grey and blue. Cool stuff!
The green monochrome screen remained however and somewhere along the line it either died or I lost interest in it for a while. At this time most of my friends were either sporting C64’s or Amiga 500’s. But because I was already an Amstrad man I saw no need to convert (not that I had the money). Today I wish I had had an Amiga, if for nothing else than the not-quite-so-sober late-night nastalgic talks with friends.
And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. For ‘a litte while’ computers passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, they ensnared another user.
I’ve got one of them in my loft (the CPC664)… also got an Atari STE170st – fuckign cracking machine with an operating system simlar to teh early Mac OS… damn those were the days of not being able to click on anything coz the double clicked had to be insanely short!
They dont make em like they used to
I’ve got an old C64 sitting around here somewhere. One of these days I’ll dig it out and mess around with it, if I can ever get the disk drive to work again.
Had myself a CPC664 as well… with that insanely fast floppy drive. God those 3” floppies could be used as bricks they were so sturdy.
Funny enough I actually dug it out much later, after I have had access to an IBM PC for a while. I distinctly remember waking up one Sunday morning and just “getting” variables and how you could use them. I then proceeded to make a file management tool that nobody would ever use. Weird.
Yeah, those discs were deadly in the right hands! Odd format as well…
Did you ever play Harrier Attack? My life revolved around Harrier Attack back then :)
Ah…the memories come flooding back. Thanks Michael. I too had a CPC464 with green monitor…I remember struggling to play ‘Platoon’ on a green screen. Favourite games at the time were probably Dizzy Series, Head over Heels, Yie Ar Kung Fu(spelling??), Robocop, Green Beret, Top Gun and Aliens. And to think I enjoyed watching the games load!
Argh! Memory-overload!
Harrier Attack ruled. My brother and I just loved every single bullet-shooting game to bits. Beach Head I & II, Platoon (I remember being floored when those Vietcongs came out of the mud in the tunnels), Commando, the original Escape From Castle Wolfenstein (in top-down 2D).
Started our own game company back then too, LOL. Thomas (a friend of my brother) knew how to code and got us into it. Aptly named SSS (Skæring Software Service – Skæring was the place we lived) we moved little text people around shooting other stuff … until I accidently turned the computer off and the joystick code was deleted and I was beaten to death by a vengefull brother. Ahhhhh, the memories.
Ah Harrier Attack.. god that game rocked!
LMAO Bjørn, why doesn’t that last bit surprise me ;)
I remember actually spending time playing games that sucked ass on that machine! Like Rambo and Ghostbusters. They were horrible! Especially Ghostbusters, man that was a bad game!
Commando on the other hand, I loved that game!
Harrier Attack was an awesome game! What about the Roland series, I think Roland in time was my fav…
Harrier Attack was wonderful. I got my first computer – ZX Spectrum 48k for Christmas when I was 12. I can still remember goiing upstairs after Christmas dinner and seeing the front screen of Harrier Attack on the TV screen. Now THAT was a Christmas to remember!
mine was the AMIGA 500 from Commodore. Those time it was a great thing around with colors unknown of among the IBM compatible aka Intel machines. The game that I still had in mind was Prince of Persia….….….but I thought the C64 Commodore is much more practical if one is into music sequencing coz it is together with Atari has the ability to run such sequencers produced by Dr T.