PETs rocked
I’ll always remember my first introduction to the “Personal Computer”. It was Cambridge in 1980 and I was a nerdy 11 year old, just starting my first year of secondary school. I was ushered into a dim, dusty classroom, where all the desks had been turned to face what looked like a prop from a science fiction movie.
It was a Commodore PET. And seated in front of it were a pair of senior kids playing what looked an awful lot like Space Invaders.
I think that’s probably the moment that I decided that I had to have one of these things. Not to wire the world, or solve the great computational riddles of our times… almost certainly not to bring peace to the middle east. No, all those ideas came much later. Right then, I just wanted my very own arcade game.
As it turned out, I didn’t actally get to play much with the school computer that year, besides writing the obligatory Hello World program in BASIC (10 PRINT “Hello World”, 20 GOTO 10). But a couple of years later I had the opportunity to spend a summer with a Sinclair ZX81. The first thing I did? I wrote a program to play tic-tac-toe. The second thing I did? Painstakingly copied the entire code for a chess game, line by line out of a computer magazine. All on a membrane keyboard, I might add.
As the years went by and I spent my childhood with first a Sinclair Spectrum, then my first true love a BBC Micro model B. My brothers had an Atari, a Vic 20, and eventually an Amiga 2000. We did a lot of fun things with those computers, but primarily, we played (and wrote) games. My first introduction to optics, perspective and 3D rendering came as result of writing a first person POV adventure game (with the help of a cunningly shoplifted programming book). Who says computers weren’t educational?
If any of this sounds familiar, get over to InterAccess. Opening today, they’re showing an exhibit called Evolution: 30 Years of Computer Games. It’s exactly what the title implies… a room full of old computers playing the arcade classics you remember as a kid. Yes, there’s even a PET.
June 26th, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | 
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On the digital art front, I just joined