I was lucky enough to grow up at the time that the home computing in the UK was taking off. Micro Live was on the telly and Sinclair User and Crash Magazine were in the news agents.
School
At school we had BBC computers, they first appeared in a little room that used to be a store room around the back of the library, then they got a whole classroom to themselves upstairs. Remarkably for the 1980s they were all networked, this allowed you to view and take over other terminals on the network and hence get into trouble with the teachers. I did get too much out of the classes as they were still trying to get people to understand a simple loop construct and I was thinking about graphics algorithms in Z80 assembly language. As I was leaving an Archimedes was added to the library lab and my friend Robert Harrison managed to get it to do amazing things with some ray tracing code he wrote. In 6 form the BBCs were used for teaching us typing and doing educational puzzles. Computing was a separate subject and we did not use computers in other lessons. However, I did use the Spectrum in my course work with X-Y Plotter project for GCSE Design and Technology and for my A-Level Chemistry I created an animated explanation of the making of sulphuric acid.
Games
At home we had a ZX Spectrum, initially a 48K one then we had the keyboard and power supply upgraded to make it a Spectrum+. I don't remember having too much of an interest in games but when I came to drop off the boxes at the The Centre for Computing History there were a lot more than I remembered. I had also amassed a wide selection of hardward too including a sound interface, speech synth, light pen and of course and Joystick interface. Most of the things I played were demo version which came on the covers on my favourite magazine, Sinclair User. As well as games on tape there were also listings in magazines that had to be painstakingly typed in. Luckily these could be saved to tape so you could stop for tea half way through. This was a good learning exercise as you got to study the code in detail and often had to debug the code as the listings were not always perfect.
Programming
We did learn a little BBC Basic at school and I also remember a summer camp over in the North East where we programmed a turtle using Logo. Most of my learning was self taught from books and I started with Basic on the Spectrum but quickly moved on to Z80 Assembly language so that I could get the most out of this little computer. I also dabbled with Forth and Pascal. I did a lot of coding on paper as the editor was loaded from tape, then the source code was saved and the assembler was loaded, the assembled version was saved and finally the debugger was loaded. The turn around process from editing to debugging was maybe 30 minutes so hence why paper was quicker.
I attempted to build my own computer game so I could be come rich and famous like the Darling Brothers, Richard and David from CodeMasters
King Penguin
The idea of the game was that you were a penguin escaping from London Zoo, fighting your way across London to the docklands to get on a ship to Argentina. There was to be several different screens to work your way through and some challenging opponents such as the man with the bowler hat and a politically incorrect Chinese tourist character. I to make my game, I had to design the health display (in the form of a large mackerel fish that turned into a skeleton version), graphics, sound effects and control system. There was a lot of coding done with things such as mask generation and mirroring code so that I did not need to load so much from tape. I also spent one summer with my parents in Wales when I drew up a lot of the graphics on squared paper.
Unfortunately the whole project was abandoned when I went to university, it was much too ambitious a project and I should have started with something a bit simpler.
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