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For this end of week show and tell, something a bit different. We’re heading back to the late 80s / early 90s, proper core memory territory!
When I was about 5 or 6, I got my very first computer of my own, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2. I’d played on the 48k before that, and even had a go on an Atari 2600, but this one was all mine. I remember my mum and dad getting it from Boots in a sale, maybe a couple of years after the +2 first came out when they was selling them off cheap, I think for £60. Yes… Boots… as in the chemist. They used to sell games and computers. Different times!
It was hooked up to an old black and white telly. No remote, no proper channels, you had to tune it in with the dial like you was searching for a radio station.
I rinsed the classics, Dizzy, Jet Set Willy, Night Lore, Manic Miner, Chuckie Egg, Head Over Heels, all them weird, brilliant little worlds, all with that very British weirdness, jank and humour.
But here’s the memory that really stuck with me, the first time I ever messed about with digital art. I got hold of “The Art Studio” off a Sinclair User cover tape compilation I probably got second hand off Ashton market. I remember one afternoon in particular spending hours drawing an Egyptian town scene, little blocky buildings and a pyramid in the background, using the brick pattern fill tool. I thought it was magic, pressing a button and watching it slowly fill the pattern in perfectly. I’m sure we must’ve been doing Bible stories at school at the time, Moses and all that, which is probably why I chose to draw that.
So yeah, that was probably the first time I realised I could build my own world on a computer.
I still have a +2 now, along with a huge box of a few hundred tapes, and fire it up sometimes, or run the games on emulators. Instantly takes me back to simpler times, black and white or four-colour screens, tape loading screeches, and imagination doing most of the heavy lifting.
And in the corner here is a little punk Dizzy I did a few years back for fun!