The 80's - Golden Age of Computers

Like most kids who where born in the 70's I lived my first few years without much contact to technology.

I remember a specific day in 1978 when the funerals of Pope John Paul I where being broadcasted live on TV after a mere 33 days in his new position as head of the Catholic church.
What I remember the most about this event is the external tuner lying on top of the TV unit with its big mechanical knob which you would turn a notch left or right to switch to one of the couple of channels available in these days.

Soon came the 1980's and an new era started of intense domestic technical development. From kitchen appliances like microwave ovens to entertainment devices such as video tape recorders (remember the Betamax vs VHS war?), the early 80's saw people of my generation witnessing major technological revolutions in the house.

But for me the first indication of where my life was heading to was when I was exposed for the first time to early home video games. My cousin who was living nearby had been lucky to receive from his parents a brand new Atari 2600 8bit game console.

I remember many Wednesday afternoons frantically playing with him games now become classic such as Frogger, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Pitfall and so on.

Every week we would rush from our school to his place across the street where we would eat, do some homework and prepare the console for hours of enjoyment.
The television had turned from a passive entertainment device into something we could interact with through joysticks.

Around that time I had an experience which would stay with me until now.

When I was 9 or 10 (it must have been around 1983) I was admitted to a hospital for a few days.
I wasn't in such bad health but I needed to be monitored.

I remember that I was sharing a room with a man. I can't remember how he looked but what was remarkable, beyond the fact that I think he had been there for a long time, is that he had with him one of the early generations of portable computer.

After some recent digging, but without certainty, I think it may have been the first Compaq Portable computer.

I think the owner was working from his hospital bed on the computer for his job. Maybe he was a journalist or a writer. I coudn't tell for sure. But what I remember was his kindness and his generosity in letting a small boy having a look at what must have been a very expensive device.

I remember that, in the course of the next few days, he let me type on the keyboard, play with some graphics applications and some other tasks.

I was mesmerized. The small green monochrome screen would make an impression that would stay with me for all my childhood.

After this experience I became obsessed with computers. But sadly my parents couldn't afford one and I had such a craving to own one that I develop an ever stronger interest into any related electronic subject.

At the time I had a friend who happened to have a father who was interested into electronics. I remember that in their house there was a room full of chips, circuit boards and, on the desk, a Commodore VIC-20.

Sometimes we were left to play on the VIC-20 but the only game I remember involved moving a mouse around the screen in search of cheese.
The VIC-20 had 20KB of ROM and 5KB of RAM, of which 3.5KB was required to run the BASIC interpreter...
Still I felt envious that my friend was so lucky to have such a wonderful device at home.

I remember one day that the Easter school break was approaching and I asked my parents to enroll me into a programming course for a week.

The lessons involved mostly the Logo programming language which involved moving programmatically a drawing pointer on the screen (called the turtle) in order to create shapes similar to one would achieve with a Spirograph.

Though this would seem pretty useless to anybody these courses introduced me to the basic concepts of conditional statements, loops and functions.
I loved it.

A couple of years passed and my thirst for any computer related matter kept on growing.
Still my parents couldn't afford one. But one day I must have been brought to a shopping center and I discovered this shop where they would sell cameras, electronics and computers.
The shop was called "Photo Hall" and, remarkably, is still open as of this day!

Of course I went straight to the computing section and, to their credit, the staff let me type on the keyboards and play with all computers on display.
This resulted in me going to the shop regularly, once a twice a week, to learn and play on these machines.
I would take the public transports and spend hours using equipment that I didn't have at home.

The staff became acquainted to me and would see me as a good opportunity to promote the products to curious potential customers. Look, even a kid can use these complicated-looking machines! :-)

Of these days I remember fondly the Shneider CPC 6128 which had the unbelievable advantage to have a build-in disk drive and a supplied color monitor (color!). At the time many computers offered the possibility to store files and programs on compact cassettes (remember the audio tapes?) through an optional tape drive. These were very very slow and quite unreliable but had the advantage that their content could be duplicated with quality double tape players/recorders!
But the Amstrad could load and save programs directly to hard floppy disks without the need to purchase expensive peripherals.

I remember also the early computer magazines which were mostly targeted at the young hackers of the time.

As well as featuring hardware and game reviews, they also featured whole computer game programs that had to be typed in by hand! Pages and pages of code which, if typed in properly, would bring life to the screen.
How magical!

Invariably mistakes would sneak in resulting in the program crashing or not working properly.
This would force me to go back into the code and try to find the places with typos or missing lines.

While tedious it was also a fantastic way to understand programming and learn from other like-minded enthusiasts.

Of those days I also remember the Amstrad PCW computer which had a disk drive build in within its monochrome monitor and was firmly targeted at text document editing.

I always associated those green phosphorus screen with high end computers for some reasons. And with 90 columns 720×256 pixels resolution, how could it have been any different? ;-)

The home computer revolution was also accompanied by great movies where technology was allowing teens to accomplish time travel in cool looking cars or threaten the destruction of the planet by thermonuclear war! All the while being the coolest guys in town and accompanied in their adventures by the most popular girl in school! How cool was that?!?

Later on at school a programming class was introduced. Taught by an under-trained teacher on ageing Apple II computers the class was the subject of much indiscipline and general lack of interest by my school mates.

But I remember how my father used to tell me how computers was the future and there was going to be massive job opportunities in IT.

After all these years his advise still resonates with me and will be passed on to my own children.

At the age of 15 I inherited a Commodore 64 along with an external floppy drive from a good friend of my Dad who sadly passed away suddenly.
As a result I spent less and less time in the computer shop and way too much time at home playing classic games on this computer that was really a great gaming platform.

These where the days when great games fitted on just over 200KB of disk space and 64KB of RAM. Days when programmers had to squeeze every bit of memory and CPU cycle to provide smooth animations and enjoyable game play. An era when computer geeks cared about writing efficient code and learn how underlying hardware worked.

It is hard not to look back at those years with nostalgia. We now live in a connected world where computers are everywhere, sit in the palm of our hand and bring us up to speed instantly with events across the globe.

Children are raised with incredible technology all around them and nobody questions the amazing feats that are taking place when we access a web page or place a phone call.

The 80's were different.

A golden era when computers could achieve anything in the mind of children and something magical was happening inside the plastic box.

Sometimes I long for those days when it was still possible to be naively enchanted by new technology.