A Beloved 80s Curiosity, My Origin Story

In the early 80s, the United Kingdom experienced something of a home computing boom. You might have heard about it. Seemingly overnight (not quite), community centers, public house function rooms, colleges and even schools were holding computer club events – often weekly or monthly gatherings; young people (most, sadly, boys) with their dads, and earnest single young men, the usual in-the-know educators and a few wise old wizards (who often had engineering or arts jobs themselves). There were a lot of beards, and bad jumpers. There would have been an overlap with CAMRA membership, had it been a thing.

Folks would struggle in from their cars with the temporarily-liberated family portable TV, dragging a mains socket extender and a cardboard box containing their beloved computer-du-jour, cables, disks, tapes and joysticks. Small crowds would gather round the screens, and almost as much wisdom and friendly advice was dispensed as was the bluster and hypothetical bullshit. People drank bad vending-machine coffee and on any given night there was usually 2 or 3 adults wheezing their way through a packet of cigarettes, indoors…

It was magical … apart from the second-hand smoke, abundant carcinogens and bad coffee.
But it was the 80s, so there’s that.

I had friends who were in on this, via their either interested or just indulgent dads, right from the very start, and several of them had been lucky enough in life to find their parents could buy the BBC Model B, usually with a monitor (luxury) and some of them even had a floppy disk drive (christ!).
I was invited to join them, and I was taken to these meetings as regularly as I could possibly manipulate.
I bloody loved it.

I was not quite so lucky as some of them, but my parents worked hard and for Xmas 1982 I was given a brand new Sinclair ZX81. It was Christmas Day, before dinner, my dad patiently sat with me in front of our family telly, dutifully doing the Xmas Day Dad stuff while we put the beast together and fired it up. I’d been given a new ZX81, a cassette recorder, and the Psion tape “Fantasy Games” (cover below).

My dad and I tried to “load” this tape, over and over again. Maybe 20 times over the course of the day. Each time we would start the ZX81 loading, we’d play the tape, we’d watch the black and white swirly lines for a few minutes, and then the tape would stop at the end, the pattern of lines changed a little, and the computer did nothing else.

Oh, we tried different volume settings. We swapped cables around. We turned it off for half an hour in case it was getting too hot. All to no avail. That bloody game wouldn’t load.

The next day was Boxing Day, and then dad would be back at work for a few days. Our next opportunity to take back the faulty kit back to the shop he got it from was a good week or so away (the kit comprising the computer, cassette recorder and the tape; we weren’t sure which was at fault).

“Why don’t you just start working through the book?,” suggested Dad. “You can start to learn how to use it, then when we get everything sorted you’ll be ready to fly”.
(This day marks the point at which my dad’s interest in computers officially ended, it lasted two whole days – three if you count the Xmas Eve shopping trip he’d made to actually buy the computer – but he’d put the initial effort in and that was all that mattered to me).

The machine’s manual is now semi-legendary, a precursor to the genuinely legendary ZX Spectrum manual. It teaches you Sinclair BASIC in a careful, steady fashion that never talks down to you (I was eleven years old) and it never leaves things unexplained or unfinished. Within the first few pages, the utter joy of seeing my own “program” on the big telly screen had cemented into me the deep foundations of what would become a full-on childhood obsession, and an eventual obvious career.

By the time we were ready to take the kit back, I had progressed to writing, saving and re-loading my own tiny programs onto a TDK-C60 that had hitherto been used for capturing the “charts” off the radio on a Sunday afternoon… and in doing this I’d confirmed that the cassette recorder worked fine. The cables were fine. The computer itself seemed to be doing everything the manual suggested it would, which left only one possibility… there was some problem with the game tape itself.

The more astute amongst you will have clocked that we were trying to load a 16Kb game into a computer blessed with a mere 1Kb, and the ZX81, such as it was, had no meaningful way of telling us we were being completely unreasonable. So it just ignored all our futile efforts.

We didn’t take the tape back that first weekend, because by then a day going to the shops seemed like a huge distraction from the more serious business of actually trying to make the computer do “my” bidding. And at some point in the following weeks, talking to my school friends and trying to understand where the edges of this brave new world might be, the penny dropped with me. Our computer and the tape weren’t quite compatible. Instead of returning the tape, I went full-speed ahead with saving my pocket money, on the seemingly endless wait from early January to my birthday, mid March, when all gifts and savings were pooled together and I bought a 16Kb “ram pack”… and now I could really get started.

“Perilous Swamp” was the b-side game on that Fantasy Games tape. I much preferred it to the a-side (which I just don’t recall at all). Owing much to things like Nightmare Park and any number of what we might now think of as rogue-like games, it was the genesis moment for me. I discovered I could stop the program while it was running, and read the code. I could change how “random” some encounters were. I could change the names of creatures, the value ranges of loot, my initial HP. I could save my changed version back to another tape. I was 12, and I felt like a computer programming god. I bought program listing magazines and dutifully typed them in, debugged the inevitable printing errors and typos on my part. I changed other people’s code. I learnt what you could do. I started to learn how to work around the computer’s limitations, and even embrace them…

Many years later, shortly before lockdown, I introduced my own daughter (then about 9 or so) to the joys of Perilous Swamp. And while it hasn’t (yet) acquired the same important status in her own life, we had a lot of fun and I went off and made a version for the iPhone…