21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (5 page)

Part of the appeal was just the look and feel of the thing. Unlike the Sinclair models, this actually had a proper keyboard, and was large and impressive. You could touch type on it, which made it easier for home programming, and it was a robust piece of kit.

It could never quite live up to the Spectrum’s game play but it did its best to hold its own, and games such as
The Wizard and the Princess
and
Wacky Waiters
became classics of the format.

It only lasted a couple of years, though, as the Commodore 64 that followed was much more powerful, and had better graphics. Nonetheless, the Vic 20 was the first computer for many people still in the industry today and is much cherished by those who owned one back then.

Commodore 64

Bigger, more powerful, and in a darker shade of beige, the Commodore 64 became the bestselling home computer of all time, with nearly 17 million machines sold. A big hit in the US, where most of its owners were located, it did not perhaps have the cult
gaming appeal in the UK that the Spectrum had, but it was a solid, dependable family computer, and the first such machine that many people owned.

BBC Micro

Education, education, education. Designed and manufactured by Acorn Computers, but supported by the BBC as part of their Computer Literacy Project, this was the machine to be found in schools. The BBC branding added a certain credibility to the machine, enabling Middle England to trust this new fangled device and allow it into their homes. When Computer Studies first hit the timetable, initially as an out-of-hours voluntary lesson, it was usually a BBC Micro that pupils learnt on, supported by a range of TV programming.

Never very cool, the BBC Micro was probably doomed by its association with the classroom. Kids wanted a Spectrum or Vic 20 to play on at home. It was also about twice the price of its more fun competitors, so never quite made it into sufficient homes to secure any traction. It remains, however, the machine that many people learnt to program on.

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Loading Computer Games from Tape

Of course, the games for all of the home computers just mentioned were loaded up by playing a cassette tape. Any tape player would do, but those rectangular box machines were the most commonly used. You would connect one to your computer with a cable, type ‘LOAD MANIC MINER’, or whatever the game was called, and then press PLAY.

A series of peculiar beeps, whirs, clicks, and general fuzziness would then be heard as the tape player communicated with the computer. Sometimes, with a bit of luck, the tape would get to the end, and the program would have loaded successfully, but the strike rate wasn’t great. It could take a few attempts to get it right.

There were no short cuts, either. A game could take five minutes or so to load, and you would invariably be looking at the screen waiting for something to happen. No Windows progress bars in those days. And you would have to go through the same process every single time you played the game. None of this download once and then it was on your computer for good. Oh no, if you wanted a quick game of
Horace Goes Skiing
after school, then you needed to twiddle your thumbs for a while first.

Progress is a wonderful thing. I can download an app to my phone within seconds and it will stay there forever, if I want. One click and I am checking a map, throwing an angry bird at a pig, or reading the latest news headlines. So why am I nostalgic for a time when it would take bloody ages, and usually two or three attempts, to get anything loaded?

I have no idea.

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Printer Paper with Holes

Next time your computer printer jams, runs out of ink, or fails to work wirelessly, cast your mind back to the early days of home computing and the very first computer printers.

Huge dot-matrix blighters, with the most impractical and bizarre paper. Long perforated rolls, rather like a giant’s toilet roll, with holes punched at regular intervals running parallel along each side. You had to feed the holes onto some prongs and then hand-crank the thing along until it was in place, and then wait 20 minutes while a device a bit like
Grandstand
’s vidiprinter spewed out vaguely readable text.

Compare a printout from a Commodore 64 to the flashy colour stuff we get today. This is all in recent memory, people; we really have come this far.

If you ever had to deal with this stuff, you will never forget it. But I doubt that you miss it.

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Dial-up Modems

With the advent of broadband internet connections and wireless connectivity, one relatively recent technological development is rapidly becoming endangered.

Less than ten years ago, if you had a home internet connection, then it would almost certainly have been dial-up. By which I mean that your computer modem would use your telephone line to call up your internet provider and connect to the service.

This little box of mysterious flashing lights and wires would let you know it was doing its job by relaying the sounds of the phone call through your computer:

[dial tone]

[sound of a phone ringing]

blleeeep burgh krpphgspreeksplangkerlungkerlungkerlung

[pause]

bleepsping plonk plonkkerchang dank dank ding

[ad lib to fade]

By the end of which you would, six or seven times out of ten, be connected to the internet. But, boy, would it be slow. Dial-up internet connections were typically 56 kilobits per second, which is 12½ times slower than the slowest broadband connection. To put that in perspective, a film that would take you 30 minutes to download via broadband today would have taken over six hours on dial-up.

And then there is the fact that it used your actual phone line. Unless you were savvy enough to have more than one line coming into the house, going online meant nobody else could use the phone. This sparked cries of, ‘Get off the bloody phone, I need to send some emails!’ or ‘Get off the bloody internet, I need to call my mother!’

So it is a good thing that we have moved on. It really is. But those of us who heard them shall never forget those squeally plinky plonky noises.

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BASIC

BASIC (the acronym stood for ‘Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code’) was the most common and popular computer programming language during the rise of the home computer in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It was simple and clunky, but effective, and, most importantly, quite easy to learn. When schools started teaching Computer Studies around that time, the lessons centred around programming in BASIC.

The language relied upon a range of instructions, many of which were written in longhand and would have made sense to even the most computer-illiterate user. For example, here is a BASIC program that most people will be able to work out.

10 PRINT “21st Century Dodos”

20 GOTO 10

RUN

If you were to type those lines into your Vic 20 or ZX Spectrum, your screen would be filled with the title of this book over and over again. What fun.

You could, of course, tackle more complex programs, and some of the most popular text adventure games of the time were entirely written in BASIC. However, for more serious gaming you needed specialised code, and as home computing became more about managing fictional football teams and running around tombs with unfeasibly breasted women, and less about two oblongs playing tennis, BASIC became a thing of the past.

At least, it did in its original guise. Ever evolving, BASIC has morphed and changed and can still be seen in the form of Microsoft Visual Basic, which remains a popular language for programmers.
Well, I say popular; it drives a lot of them mad, but it is still around. Not quite extinct yet.

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Compact Discs

Can you remember when compact discs were the future? When the presenter on
Tomorrow’s World
tried to prove they wouldn’t scratch or jump (which we all now know was a lie but we believed back then)? When you plugged in your first CD player? I bet you can still remember the first CD you ever bought. Mine was
Hello Hello Hello (Petrol)
by Something Happens, a CD single that I purchased a full three months before I had a machine to play it on.