No, it’s not my own birthday today, but the 25th birthday of the groundbreaking ZX Spectrum.
I still remember the excitement as the bundled Horizons tape threw up a proper loading screen (rather than the psychedelic loading squiggles I’d grown used to on the ZX81), and later presented me with Thro’ the Wall, a full colour Breakout clone. Which was written entirely in BASIC of course, complete with neat squashy visual effect as the ball hit the paddle… turned out to be nothing more clever than swapping UDGs when the ball hit row 21, but half the fun in those days was finding out things like that so you could do it yourself. If only making computers do things were still that easy…
Way too many favourite games from the Spectrum era to list here (feel free to add your own), but suffice it to say I still play many of them via FUSE on my PowerBook! Thanks for the memories, Clive.
Boy, this brings back good memories! My first computer was a ZX 90 when I was very little. I loved that computer and spent many hours writing small games. I kept a small notebook with my code around… good old days. 😉
Cheers,
Og
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K that my father bought around 1984. I was 11 or 12 years old then. Memories… 🙂
And using the English language manual included caused me a lot of trouble later when I learned English in high school, because I pronounced all English words in this manual as how they would be pronounced in Dutch… 😉