Old Tech
When Did Technology Become So Dull?
How gadgets lost their shine
In 1982 my father bought me a ZX Spectrum home computer. It was a big event for me, and I still think about it today.
I remember opening the box and inspecting the contents like they were a collection of Fabergé eggs. They were that precious.
For the next week, I worked through the HORIZONS tutorial that explained how the damn thing worked. Home PCs were new in the UK, and apart from a few tech heads, most people didn’t have a clue what a computer was. It was literally a new horizon.
After I figured out that there was not much else the Spectrum could do apart from play games, I loaded the one that came with it called Penetrator. Very basic but very fun, as you could design your own landscape and place as many rockets, missiles and aliens as you wanted.
I don’t think I ever finished the game. It just went on and on forever without any ending. Perhaps an allegory for childhood itself?
Of course, the system wasn’t without its faults. The computer was slow, the graphics were basic, it crashed a lot, and if a game loaded at all, you were lucky. It wasn’t as good as the Atari system or the Commodore 64, but there was something about the ZX with its squidgy keyboard I loved, and millions of others did as well.
The computer I’m using now is a mid-price ASUS laptop. Let’s take a comparison, just for fun. Because that’s what computers used to be. Fun!
ASUS Zenbook 13
RAM: 8 GB
Disk space: 512 GB
Speed: 1.80 GHz
ZX Spectrum 48K
RAM: 48K
Disk Space: 16K
Speed: 3.5 MHZ
With a gigabyte equalling a million kilobytes, you can imagine how plodding these machines were. My model didn’t even have a hard drive, the operating system relying on the 16k of ROM to make it work. All other applications/games/storage used cassettes.
Remember this set up?
When an off-the-shelf tape player was needed to load up the games. Two-dimensional platform adventures that took twenty minutes to load and whose characters moved as slow as snails, even when performing martial arts.
This was one of my favourites called Saboteur.
The ‘ninja’ trained hero having to negotiate his way through a ‘labyrinth’ of dark tunnels to find some secret hard disks that would reveal the name of rebel leaders. The cover artwork clearly drew me in.
Other games, like Alien 8 (below), had a kind of pseudo three-dimensional, almost psychedelic edge to them, and you could get lost in them for days.
Until it crashed.
Then you’d have to start all over again from the beginning…fun times!
So why all this silly nostalgia? Sounds like a total nightmare.
It was.
But there was something real about it. Perhaps it was the whirring tape player. Or the fact that it was almost a battle in itself to get anything to work, especially if the games were copied, which you could do by linking two cassette recorders together.
Maybe kids these days fawn over their new iPhones they get for Christmas and birthdays. I hope so. But I’ve a feeling it isn’t the same. They know what a Smartphone is. Their friends have them. Their parents have them. Everyone has them.
Back then the ZX Spectrum was an oddity. Everyone had heard of computers, but no one had actually seen one. My grandparents regarded it as an alien artefact. Especially as the most advanced thing they owned was a brand-new Ferguson remote control TV.
So do I still get a buzz when receiving technological gadgets?
Last Christmas I bought myself a smartphone for the first time. I was looking forward to it, but when the courier delivered it, the joy evaporated within minutes — seconds even.
What I had in my hand was just another computer but with a phone attached to it. There was no sense of discovery. The phone was just another functional item that I would work out how to use within hours. Then replace every two or three years with an almost identical model.
Where’s the fun in that? In forty years time, will I be writing:
In 2022 I bought a Xiaomi Redmi phone. It was a big event for me, and I still think about it today.
Probably not.
Thanks for reading, for related stories:
