I wonder if any of you can remember a Commodore home computer which went by the name of "Vic 20"? So called because it had a sensational 20k of memory! Those were the days.. same era as the ZX80 spectrum.. Space invaders in the arcades... and punk rock :)

It must have been very early 80s. Home computers were the rage with a whole bunch of them.. ZX80, Dragon, Atari and a bunch more. My dad came home one day with a "Vic 20" and said to me "There ya go son, see what you can do with that.. by the way, you don't get any games until I see a 'hello world' produced on the thing."


I kid you not, that is how I got into programming :-) Great incentive to learn as well as I really wanted a PacMan clone called Jellymonsters. Anyway, my first program was a colorful "Hello world" scrolling forever with a "goto" command. Boy was I proud of that. The language of course was basic and all data storage in those days was carried out with a completely unreliable tape recorder set up. Anyway.. Within a short space of time I got my Jellymonsters. Played it a few times and I decided that "I could program that" ;-) Well of course I couldn't but I had a dang good try. My first ever program was a basic "Higher or Lower" card game based on a popular TV show at the time. Displays a card and you guess whether the next in the pact was higher or lower. took about 5 minutes to write. Take 52 cards and assign them randomly to an array. Easy peasy. Proud as punch with that I moved on to meatier projects.. Bobs and sprites.. which to the layman means your space invader or ship.. essentially an image to be manipulated. My first decent game was a Fruit machine program written on the Vic 20 in basic. I was one proud teddy bear of this program, nudges, double or nothing, real fruit graphics, flashing and beeping things galore. I even had a local shop interested in selling it. Well and truly bitten now and Jellymonster was gathering dust.

I needed moreeee. It came in around 1982 I recall. Dad came home with this box which said BBC on it, it didn't look like a television box though as it was too flat to be a TV. All was revealed when out came the "Acorn BBC 'B' home computer". Now this was a MAJOR improvement over the Vic 20.. It may well have had as much as 64k in it! ;-)

Anyway it was the computer they were using in the schools and was therefore a shrewd buy by dad. this time though I needed no encouragement not to just use it to play games, with which is sadly what seems to be happening amongst the kids today. Out came my Vic 20 Fruit machine code print outs and away I went. This time however I had scrolling reels.. multiple colored sprites.. a lot more flashing things and beeps and all the latest arcade features on a fruit machine. It went down well amongst my school friends, but because it was in basic it wouldn't have been a commercial product. Assembly language / hard coding was becoming the rage at this time. I was quite happy messing about with basic and writing a city bombing game amongst other things. Went to college and passed computer studies with flying colours.


Time to fast forward a bit.. I'm 20 years old all my fellow soldier friends are buying a computer called an "Amiga". One look at this and that was it.. straight down the shops and my money hit that counter in double quick time :-) Took it home and read the features list.

Needless to say, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

I loved my Amiga (still do). It gets a hard time from pc owners, but I can tell you that some of the graphics software and capabilities of the Amigas custom graphics chip set make even a high end PC look second rate, even today. I wrote a program called "Moon Base Alpha" which was kind of a 'shoot em up' come 'guide through meteorite storm' type game. All graphics programming and sound done myself. I was chuffed to bits with it and intended to release it into the shareware world. Alas the Amiga pretty much died on me. Commodore Amiga went bust and sold out.. then it was sold again.. and again . I have no idea who owns Amiga technologies right now. I still have it but the power transformer is broke and as I have a PC and the Amiga is no longer really supported it is lying unused in the cellar. There was some great software though, did you know the game "Worms" first started on the Amiga? In fact an awful lot of games started on the Amiga and then ported over to the PC. One thing I do regret is not getting into C/C++ or assembly language in my younger days. Basic is a slow language as it requires an interpreter (On the Amiga I used an Amiga specific language called AMOS.. it was very good but one hell of a byte eater.) One day I'll find time to get into C++. At the moment I'm enjoying learning HTML and will soon have Javascript under my belt to some degree. Next on my list is cgi script programming and Perl. All in good time though. It is in fact an ambition of mine to make a living from a computer related profession. My Backgammon site was my very first attempt at HTML so I'm quite pleased with it. In fact, if I could chose my profession, I would say I would like to be a web site designer / programmer. That would really be my cup of tea. I might do some web designing yet in my spare time. I want to get some more experience first though of course. BTW another website under construction by yours truly is a site I'm developing for work. Basically a German estate agency site. This little baby is coming along nicely and is getting quite complex as forms are need probably with cgi scripting too.

I love programming though as it really does give you a sense of achievement seeing your own work slowly taking the shape you originally intended.

I think that will do for this page.. I've rambled on long enough :-)

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