Christmas is a time for revisiting the past. One only has to see all those women out and about wearing their big Christmas jumpers with leggings, and to listen endlessly to all the Christmas pop music (Wham!, Shakin’ Stevens, Wings, etc), to realise that the 80s are once again doing the rounds again. Thankfully mullets and denim shirts haven’t made a return to men’s fashion. And that Sir Cliff hasn’t released a new Christmas album. Yet.
Here at Drake Towers, Essex division, the 80s and 90s are being revisited through photos. Some of them quite embarrassing, like this one (I was about 14 or 15 at the time):
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But what really intrigued me was the photos of my old Spectrum +2A with Kempston mouse and joystick:
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The +2A was an abomination of a computer. Whilst the +2 was a perfectly acceptable and working machine, Sinclair (aka Amstrad) decided to roll out a revised model that used the +3 ROMs to save a bit of development/manufacturing money (presumably). The result was that memory mapping was a little bit different from the original +2 and 128k models and this upset a lot of games.
Which crashed.
Having spent 5-10 minutes loading the game, to find that the machine then reset itself was incredibly infuriating. This was my last Amstrad-produced consumer computer. We did eventually buy an Amstrad PC3086 as my first ever PC-compatible, but even that had problems. Never bought an Amstrad product again after that.
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The Apple IIe, however, was a magnificent machine. My first toy from Steve Jobs & Co. Not only did I learn to use spreadsheets and proper word processing on this thing, but also 6502 assembly code thanks to the Apple II’s built in assembly debugger. I passed with distinction on my low-level hardware unit for my BTEC thanks to this wonderful device. It was also my first computer with a disk drive (actually, I had three of them!) and disk operating system. It taught me a lot about computing.
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It was a long time before I started using Apple products again. Throughout university, when learning Modula-2, the silly things kept crashing and it was infuriating learning something on a hardware/software platform that kept on crashing on a regular basis. It did, however, teach me to keep saving at very regular intervals and to keep several backup copies. A practice that’s been wit me ever since.
It wasn’t until I started working for The Moving Picture Company and a nice lady producer (who used to work for MTV) wanted me to look at her Powerbook problem that I really got back in Apple kit. I really liked OS X and the whole thing felt like a better experience than Linux with its multitude of inconsistent Windows managers. I’ve been hooked, as they say, ever since.
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