Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the Personal Computer or “PC”. Indeed, it was IBM that introduced the concept of the personal computer at the cheapest versions then would set you back $1,565, which is probably about the same amount of money it cost to send the first Space Shuttle into orbit. Of course, I jest. I remember my first experience of a PC. It was 1981 and I was at school. The class fell silent as the computer was wheeled into the room and, in pairs, we were allowed some private time with the new machine. The screen was green on black and the type a bit difficult to read. We played some kind of maths game with robots, it was pretty basic.
But I was hooked and a couple of years later, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was launched in this country. OK – it wasn’t a personal computer as we know it, but it created a lot of computer geeks. I loved my ZX Spectrum and spent numerous hours typing computer games into the computer using the impossible rubber keyboard – I think this is what helped me develop my 60-words a minute typing speed. My touch typing has always been a skill of mine, but then I did have an electronic typewriter as a birthday present once. Typing out computer games from magazines, which always ended up as either being crap or didn’t work, seems incredible now. I can’t imagine the youth of today having the patience or intelligence to do it, but we did in those days because none of my peers had the disposable income to buy new games every week. Ooooh, the good old days, I am indeed becoming misty-eyed. My early teenage years was filled with computer games such as JetPac, Jet Set Willy and Sabre Wulf.
I used my Spectrum for everything and even wrote one of my first novels on it. I had a little Brother 9-pin printer that I’d use to print out my text and I even used it to create the centre spread of the College magazine using a primitive DTP application. That was the first co-production between myself and The Missus all those years ago. Cripes, I feel really old now.
Fast forward a couple of years and The Missus managed to convince her folks to give her the cash for our first proper PC to celebrate her 21st birthday. We trekked down to Morgan Computers off Tottenham Court Road and secured one of the job lot Wang computers they were flogging. Wang (don’t laugh at the back) had gone into liquidation and so their stock was being flogged at discount prices. I think it cost a few notes under £500, which was an impossible amount of money for us. We got an expensive cab home with all these large boxes and I spent hours setting the thing up.
In those days, PCs weren’t as much fun or useable as they are now. There were no CD-ROMs or DVDs or CD writers or fancy video card or even sound cards. You effectively had an expensive, silent computer and if you wanted it to do anything clever, you had to add bits on like accessories. So over time, I bought a sound card and upgraded bits of it and often spent hours when the Operating System went down. Windows 3.1 was useable to a level, but if memory serves correctly, if something went wrong you very often had to reiinstall the whole operating system from scratch. Oh what fun.
Over the years, the Wang got superseded and bits were salvaged to go on to create my subsequent machines. I’ve built my own PCs ever since because it is always been cheaper to upgrade. I’ve bought the odd cheap base unit, but often ripped out the guts and bastardised the thing to create my own model.
It’s funny how PCs would be integral to home life. When I was a kid I always knew that computers would be in every home, but I didn’t expect the Internet to be the catalyst to draw them in. Again, I was kind of there at the beginning when the Internet started to gain popularity in the UK in the mid-90s and I started using the net from about 1996 – so I have been online for a decade, cripes! I’ve been there and done it all. In the early days it was like the Wild West and the trick really was to avoid all the child and animal porn. Yes, one wrong click on the newsgroups and you’d find yourself looking at an image that would disturb your entire day. Thankfully, that’s all gone now.
I remember learning HTML from a big book, so that I could program my first own webpage. That’s what it was like – you had to buy books to learn how to use it. It was very difficult to find stuff on the net and Google was years away. Altavista was the search engine of choice and Mosaic was the browser. I remember being amazed by the early MSN webchat pages and made some online pals, but when I got my first stalker I have never really let myself get involved with out online entities.
The Internet is a scary place populated by weirdos like me – be warned! 😉

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