Being a child of the 80s, and a total geek it turns out, some of my greatest memories from my childhood involve computers. Playing interactive chess at my mum’s computer at work when she’d have to take us in on a weekend and getting my first taste of modern gaming with the original Nintendo were enough to get me hooked.
There’s nothing quite like waking up on a Saturday morning and shooting ducks on a screen or rescuing the princess from the evil King Koopa!
We can live it all again – kind of!
The National Museum of Computing hosted its first Vintage Computer Festival last week. Held at Bletchley Park, notorious as Britain’s code-breaking centre during WWII and the pioneering location for digital computers, the event brought in more than 2,000 enthusiasts.
Besides the retro games that were running, and being played, on some of the machines, other computers had been modified to run newer programmes and show the world just what they could do. Among the demonstrations were a ZX Spectrum running Twitter, and a Commodore VIC-20 producing sounds and graphics.
I think it’s important to note here that the whole point of the festival is to preserve and spread the story of the computer revolution by allowing people to experience those technologies. After all, if you know your past, you’re future is more likely to be a success.
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Posted on January 20, 2011 by Craig McCallum
What a youngster – a child of the 80s indeed. I preferred being a child of the 60s living and programming in London at the time – cutting my teeth on exotic beasts like the LEO 326 and IBM system 30/40s with bog all memory and disk storage. Happiness was falling down the stairs while carrying 4 boxes of 80 column cards to be compiled – just as well they were numbered and sequenced for the card sorter!! A really good day was at Mobil Oil at the Abert Embankment office (very handy for squash at Dolphin square and Zombies at Trader Vic’s at the Hilton with the American manager’s AMex card) when my pint of beer was balanced on top of the IBM N…. printer – I forgot that the lid rose automatically when paper ran out – for some reason they banned booze and coffee in the computer room when working late at night………………..