It was the long hot summer of 1976 and I was four years old. On this particular day, my Uncle John (I didn’t know he was crazy back then) had let me play in his car, parked as it was by the kerb outside our house. With no key in the ignition I could sit there and pretend to drive for hours and the family knew just where I was.

I don’t know how long I’d been out there, but the kid who lived next door, Tommy McLaren, wandered over after spotting me in the car. Tommy was a few years older than me and he was really into cars – cars and The Fonz. He was a good kid – his parents were friends of the family by virtue of our houses sharing one big back garden. He always had time for me and I never felt threatened by him like I did with most of the other older boys around the estate.

He was cool too, I suppose, but then at that age I guess all older boys appeared to be cool because they had better toys and bigger bikes. That last part was a sore spot because, being four, my bike had a little red saddlebag and stabilisers. Back in those days the cool bike of choice was a Raleigh Chopper and they were much too big for me. Tommy had one of those – I was never really keen on them, but I could appreciate why they were cool – with a big red gear lever in the centre console and a fat rear tire, it looked like a man’s bike. His also had a CB ariel sticking out from the seat pillar – bikes didn’t come much cooler than that in the mid 70′s.

After I wrestled down the window, Tommy asked if he could play in the car with me. I was delighted, but the problem was he wanted to do the pretend driving. I told him that Uncle John had let me be in charge of the car and that although he could join me, he couldn’t drive it.

“If you let me drive, I’ll teach you how to ride your bike without stabilisers.” Tommy said.

Read the rest of this entry →

It would be a christmas in the mid-80′s when cousin Iain got his Crossbows & Catapults set. I showed little interest in it initially – I couldn’t tell you what I got that year, but the fact that Iain’s present of choice involved Viking vs Barbarian conflict and not some kind of space battle probably had a lot to do with my apathy.

As tradition dictates, the family ended up at Auntie Mary’s place for a slap up meal at some point over the festive period. For some reason Auntie Mary has always been well stocked with office equipment – from “magic” markers that at some point I had been accused of getting my younger cousins to sniff for kicks, to thick sheaths of paper and rubber bands a plenty, she was better stocked than Office World.

It was the quality rubber bands, however, that transformed Crossbows & Catapults from mundane to the extreme battleground depicted in the adverts. The catapults didn’t exactly need souping up, but the crossbows, my word, with their puny elastic bands replaced with taught rubber they became weapons of mass destruction.

Read the rest of this entry →

I was introduced to the ZX Spectrum by long-time, on-off family friend, Alan Green in late 1982. I’d go round to Alan’s house and sit in the corner of his lounge, where he had the Spectrum hooked up to a portable tv, and play the early games for it with him.

Alan always tried to get me interested in programming for it, too, saying I should work my way through the manual, which had examples and an index of every command that could be accessed from the Spectrum’s rubber multi-function keypad. Initially I gave that kind of thing a wide berth, as playing games was so much more fun than all the heavy duty stuff.

By the time I got my own Spectrum for Xmas 1983 I was right into it, though, writing loads of little programs in Sinclair Basic – most of which would draw random circles on the screen, or ask you for your name before PRINTing it out in random colours (Or pseudo-random, in the case of the Spectrum – there’d always be an emergent rainbow pattern that formed if you filled the screen up with “random” colours).

Read the rest of this entry →