#25 *

I keep forgetting to say why I called this blog 'Blame Uncle Clive'. Well, for starters, I'm not Uncle Clive. Nor do I have an uncle who is called Clive, nor are there any parentally-aged friends of the family called Clive who could be 'honorary uncles'... nor do I have any young friends called Clive who I call Uncle in some sort of ironic way. Infact I do not know anyone called Clive at all. I don't even know if the bloke I refer to as Uncle Clive, has any nieces or nephews.... I hope he does though, because he would make a most goodly uncle... infact it would be one of the acest things if this Uncle Clive was actually your real Uncle Clive, especially if it was during the early Eighties. But whether he has actual nieces or nephews or not, most people who think of him as Uncle Clive are no relation and have never met him... possibly there are many thousands of us who affectionately call him Uncle Clive. Can you guess who it is yet? He's as British and as inventive as Baird, Swan, or the real McCoy. He is of course Sir Clive Sinclair. He's the one to blame. He's the one that gave a glimmer of hope that life might actually turn-out to be interesting, creative, even exciting, for the common man. Imagine, if you will, it had only been about half a decade since man first walked on the moon and Concorde had started conveying passengers at over twice the speed of sound -- technology seemed to be racing ahead, but those giant exciting steps for mankind didn't really seem to be directly effecting the boring everyday life of a man (or of a boy as I was then)... ordinary life was still very very ordinary. At first there were...hmm.. err.. I know: biros, oo and digital watches and electronic calculators (although you were still not allowed to use them in school because it was thought they'd turn your brain to jelly)... oh and things like smaller, cheaper, more reliable radios and, later, tellies thanks to transistors'n'silicone chips. I can't remember the exact year, and anyway perhaps it'd been going-on for a while without me noticing... but finally, finally, something really new and interesting did happen... something especially interesting to your typical boy like me (no, not girls, apparently they weren't new and had been invented long ago)... that miracle of technology had arrived: computers! That's what happened: computers. And none of your boring boring boring boring boring desk top PC shit either... no... and the chances are the first time the average 'man on the street' got down and dirty and interfaced with a computer was indeed: on the street, by going into the arcade, or even into their local chip shop for that matter, to play Space Invaders, Asteroids, and the like -- proper proper computers, cool computers... no not just 'cool' but 'kuh-oo-oo-ool'. Computers that would still be just as fun and easy to use today as they were then. Babbage, Lovelace would have wet themselves with glee if they could have seen how their science had been used to excite the senses and in such a fun way. When going on your hols to the coast with your Mum Dad and Sister the arcades beckoned, they were the highlight of the whole trip. Imagine where there had been a 'man-machine interactivity void' since the year dot for there to be, seemingly suddenly, these boxes with space ships, cowboys, submarines, aliens and missiles darting around their screens in hot glowing phosphor, drawing your gaze like a magnet, ready to be controlled by you. Oh and the sound -- one of my favorite sounds in the whole world was that of the late 70's arcade... because each sound was synthesized and comparatively simple and pure compared to the sounds of today's computer games so they didn't merge together as a mush of noise but instead they formed a beautiful varied mix of sound, like the dawn chorus on some far-off tropical alien world. If only I could hear that sound again. If only. The fun continued. More and more interesting games appeared, and also you began to be able to buy simple video games to play at home, which usually consisted of batting piercingly white square balls back and forth across your old valve telly's screen. It was one era handing over to the next really, as the old valve telly hosted the youthful exuberance of the new silicone chipped computer... the latter, incidentally, hastening the demise of the former by its brilliant white bats and balls permanently burning themselves into the tellies' phosphor screens. Then things moved-up a notch -- I remember in 1979 seeing a proper version of Space Invaders on an Atari console at my friends house on a telly-- now that was impressive, very impressive. But something was missing in all of this for a young enquiring mind. My Farther worked for a large company: Lucas, where they actually had a computer for doing design work on (Computer Aided Design as it is known) and he would sometimes talk about them and try and explain to me about how you write a program and how the computer follows it...I remember at the time I couldn't quite 100% get it because computers were like nothing ordinary people had ever dreamt-of, so without my Dad making it into a detailed lecture about how you made programs and how they were stored and all that (which might have risked putting me off the subject) it was just hard for me to imagine how all this stuff really worked.... however he had achieved the important thing of planting that notion in my head that people programmed computers and maybe, just maybe, one of those people, one day, might be me. And slowly but surely every video game I played a tiny nagging feeling or notion grew that someone, somewhere, was making... programming... these games, which gradually fed a frustration that I was being left-out. By this time, the late 70's, there were computers that you could buy and program but they did cost a couple of thousand quid for the most basic one, or at least that's what I remember from watching Tomorrow's World back then. Britain was still very poor compared to the USA and these computers must have been aimed at the US market because literally no-one I knew, no-one my parents knew, or even anyone I had ever even heard-of, owned or had access to a computer that you could program. No-one but no-one. Essentially they did not exist. Then it happened. One of those people who had been making those there new-fangled calculators that had been turning childrens' brains to jelly: Clive Sinclair, made something new -- he'd only gone and dun-it hadn't he? The clock struck 1980 and the 21st century began 20 years early in our household. The ZX80 was born -- a user programmable computer that could be bought for just 100 quid...it even had rudimentary graphics. My Dad was quite quick off the mark and ordered his quite soon after pawing-over the ads in The Observer colour supplement...he was very keen, both to get his hands on it himself, and to educate me about computers, in equal measure. It was fantastic... ideal timing for a 14 year old too, here was modern technology and I could control it. My Dad, of course did his best to try and enthuse me to use it for maths and physics calculations to help me learn about those subjects at the same time as learning about computers, and he did have some success with me... but mainly I was totally blinkered and set about experimenting writing games every spare moment. It was primitive compared to arcade games -- for starters you couldn't do animations unless they were extremely flickery because the computer was not powerful to display the picture on the telly and do calculations at the same time. I remember writing a space rocket flight type emulator -- which could not have any graphics due to the ZX80' limitations -- it just had lots of figures like velocity and gravity etc... and I also wrote a cowboy 'draw and shoot' quick-gun reaction time game where the computer was one cowboy and you were the other.

Well that was the start of the golden age of computers (which I will cover in a future blog entry) where nearly everything in the field of software was still out there to be invented, and games were still games and not alternate realities. For now I think the golden age has long finished, it perhaps finished in the mid Nineties, but that's not to say there is not another one just round the corner and we won't know until it hits us in the face. At the moment things have fragmented a bit too much and become a bit too abundant -- too much of a good thing -- there are so many different types of computer with different types of operating systems ('platforms') it's hard to know where to begin or which to choose to program games for. You can't even program some computers at all, like the games consoles, because the manufacturers only allow established companies to program them -- nothing there for the common man. And even platforms you can program, like the PC with windows, you have to choose a computer language and vendor and do a lot of down-loading of development kits and all sorts before you can actually write a single line of program, and not to forget that it takes 5 minutes for a PC to boot before you can do anything at all on it.... you see with the ZX80 (and its successors the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum) you could just switch it on and literally within 5 seconds you could be programming -- the only language available for it: BASIC, was already loaded and ready to go. So the choice of platform was something that you didn't have to worry about in 1980. It's a bit like telly, once there was not much to watch and only 2 or three channels -- but it wasn't half quick to decide what you wanted to watch, and, chances are, you friends watched the same programme so you had a shared experience, and you didn't have the nagging feeling that you were missing something good on some other channel so you appreciated it much more.


Sadly now, there are no people visiting the moon, there is no supersonic passenger travel, and there are no natty little computers that anyone can switch-on and instantly program a little game on when ever the mood takes them without the distractions of email and operating system updates and virus checkers and goodness knows what else. In my opinion we are back in 1968. Roll-on 1980 o'clock.