Once the last long summer holiday was over and I started my first year at secondary school, a new friend I made admonished me for owning an Atari VCS console. He said he didn't want a dead-end console, where you could only buy and play games that Atari released. Instead of a console, his mum had bought him a proper computer, a 16k Sinclair ZX81, so that he could play and make his own games. Intrigued I went around his house after school that day to look at his new computer. It was a black marvel that was delicate as it was powerful with its iconic membrane keyboard. The ZX81 was delicate because the power pack would sometimes disconnect too easily whilst typing turning the power off. Even so, I knew after that day I wanted a computer too, as I wanted to make my own games. He only had a couple of games for it. My friend spent so long on his ZX81 that I never got to see much of him after school again. The rare moments I did get to be at his house, it was staring at the black and white television screen of the ZX81, playing simple games like 3D Monster Maze. It was a terrifyingly silent experience, but it was enough to spark our juvenile fantasies about creating our own games. It came to nothing.
Jon Roberts, an older man who was renting a room in my parents house at the time, had a strong interest in electronics and computers and bought himself a Sinclair ZX80 kit computer. It was the predecessor to the ZX81, and only came in kit form, i.e. you had to build it yourself. It was a blue and white angular and flat machine with a blue and black keyboard and the tiniest 1k memory you could imagine. It wouldn't take Jon long to use all the memory up with even the most simple BASIC programs he wrote. Jon would reluctantly let me watch him work at his computer and I saw him slowly make games for it. I remember he programmed his own simple text adventure maze game in which you needed to find the exit. He watched and laughed as I found the exit impossible to find. He was quite crafty in that the only way you could escape was to turn one hundred and eighty degrees and go backwards, as you started the game at the entrance, so if you turned around it suddenly became the exit. He would have made a great games designer. I had highly unrealistic expectations of him just making magical computer games while I watched without any real understanding of the hard work involved with programming to make the magic happen.
My parents saw my growing interest in computers. Either that or Jon kept telling them I spent far too much time in his room watching him create computer programs, when he’d rather be left alone to learn about programming intricacies himself. My parents realised that consoles were dead end entertainment machines. You couldn’t be very creative with a games console despite Atari having released a BASIC programming cartridge for their VCS and several “educational” games. My parents resolved that they would buy me a proper computer and most likely heeded Jon’s advice and went in search of a shop that sold computers.
Back in those days computers were either business machines or kit/enthusiast machines, the affordable home computer market was still a year away. Sinclair sold the ZX80 and ZX81 both in complete and it kit form, but were still considered electronic machines rather than home computers, and neither featured a keyboard that was anything more that basic. Jon was interested in electronics, and would often build his own devices out of electronic breadboards he purchased from mail order catalogues, so for him the ZX80 was a perfect machine to build and play with. My parents came across a computer shop that was selling only business computers but it did stock a home computer, the EACA Color (sic) Genie EG2000. It was a Chinese produced home computer version of the TRS-80 home computer. It had no commercial appeal, and no one I knew had ever heard of it, and certainly it had very little commercial software written for it back then or at any time. The machine was a modest success in Germany and Australia before it was ousted by more well known machines. Even thirty years later it has a very small Wikipedia webpage and a few fan pages and videos. It is often and rightly overlooked. But the Genie did have eight colours, and it did have more memory as standard than the ZX80 or ZX81 at 16k, and had a proper version of BASIC to learn to program with. It had serial ports for a joystick, a printer and a light pen, all of which were prohibitively expensive for me, usually the same price as the home computer itself, and were fundamentally useless without software to drive them. The Color Genie was beige and boring, but it did have a full proper keyboard that enabled me to learn to type reasonably fast, and to be fair it did look like a proper computer, unlike any of the Sinclair machines. I never really did much with the Color Genie other than type in programs from computer magazines such as Computer & Video Games and play around with simple BASIC programs. Most of them would only work with modification, mostly down to syntax of the language. I never developed the tenacity and discipline to write computer programs.
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