reblog

I have always had a fascination for gadgets and gizmos. My favourite toys as a child were those with flashing lights and moving parts. Christmas 1973 I got the Mousetrap Game. Readers will recall the game consisted of moving counters - mouse shaped - around the board according to the roll of the dice; players would somehow construct a mousetrap out of plastic parts such as a bathtub and an old boot. I can’t recall ever actually playing a complete game - I just liked to construct the Mousetrap.

In subsequent years, birthday and Christmas presents included a multicoloured torch; the Six Million Dollar Man action figure (complete with bionic arm that could be cranked up using a button in Steve Austin’s back); a Thomas Salter chemistry set; a Rolf Harris Stylophone. Then in the late 1970s, TV games of the “Pong” variety became the must-have present.

My first encounter with such games was a year previously on the Isle of Man ferry when I persuaded Dad to cough up ten pence for a go on an arcade machine which I recall played a World War One aerial combat game. Players were required to manoeuvre white blobs around a cathode ray tube and shoot other white blobs using slightly smaller black blobs. The game was over within half a minute of parting with the cash prompting Dad to declare it “utter rubbish”.

Christmas 1978 was the year TV games became the must-have. The lad next door received a TV game console that could play four or five variants of the basic bat-and-ball style game. As well as game paddles (a medieval version of the joystick) the other main peripheral was a gun which one could use to shoot white blobs on the TV screen at fifty paces. I was barely able to conceal my disappointment when the same year I got a slot racing game – like a Scaelextric but made by Matchbox. A year before, such a present would have been the ultimate of cool but such toys were going the same way as Sticklebricks and Meccano.

The following year every child wanted to receive one of the hand-held electronic games that had become all the rage. Presumably with the previous year’s experience of fights over Nana being unable to watch “Gone with the Wind” because the kids were hogging the telly with their “Pong” game; parents were only too happy to oblige.

That year I got a rather chunky red device with ominous flashing lights called “Merlin”. More versatile than one-game competitors such as “Simon” and “Electronic Battleships”, Merlin was able to play nine different games including Tic-Tac-Toe, Mastermind and a “remember the sequence” game like Simon. By Christmas 1980, TV games had become even more sophisticated and cartridge-based consoles started to appear such as the Atari 2600.

It was about that time – around aged 13 - I started to develop an interest in electronics and radio; I had also become interested in girls but as the interest was hardly mutual I stuck to soldering irons and vero-board for the time being. I got an electronics mag and saved up the dosh for the parts to build an electronic dice. The integrated circuit at the heart of it all was about three weeks pocket money but idea of making my own box of flashing lights was all enticing. After several days work, all I had to show for it was a plastic box with six holes for red LEDs drilled in, burnt fingers and solder everywhere.

Then one day at school towards the end of the third year I was hanging around the maths room reading an article in “Practical Electronics” about BASIC programming. The maths department also owned the school computer – an RML380Z with dual floppy drives – and the teacher suggested I try typing in the program listing which would enable the lucky user to run a program that can calculate Ohm’s Law. After a few hours I had got used to the BASIC editor and once the teacher had corrected my typos I had a running program which could be viewed at the school open day.

At about the same time, my uncle had done a career shift from teaching to computing and on visits to their house I got to play with various bits of kit he had hanging around such as a Sharp MZ-80K, and learned how to write useful programs such as:

10 INPUT “What is your name?”, A$
20 PRINT A$,” is a moron”
30 GOTO 20

As time went on, the programs got more sophisticated and by use of a FOR…NEXT loop I was able to print the message a fixed number of times.

In 1981, Clive Sinclair released the ZX81 which came with 1KB memory and about a year later the ZX82 – renamed the ZX Spectrum – was unleashed upon the world. I managed to persuade Dad to part with the £120 for a 16KB model and so in June we phoned the Sinclair Research order line. Dad’s credit card was duly debited and then we waited the famous twenty-eight days for our Speccy with silicone keyboard to arrive. The days turned into weeks and the weeks into months but the postman did not oblige. Uncle Clive had clearly not anticipated the clamour for these micros and we had a weekly ritual of calling the Sinclair helpline and getting nowhere.

What really took the biscuit was when in full view of the TV cameras; Mrs Thatcher presented the Japanese prime minister with a Speccy as a gift. Presumably it was to showcase the best of British industry. Clearly she had not spent years waiting for it to arrive in the post.

In November of 1982 I arrived home from school and it had finally arrived. There followed a frenzied unpacking and plugging in and eventually the computer was connected to Nana’s colour telly to cries of “how am I going to watch Crossroads now?” We loaded up the “Horizons” demo cassette and enjoyed the spectacle. It showed all the capabilities of the Spectrum including a breakout-style game.

The next months my O-level studies had to share space with my desire to program in BASIC. In the end a compromise was found as I found the computer was great for checking my maths homework in. I just wrote programs that would accept numbers as input parameters; apply the formula for that week’s homework and spit out the answers. It was actually a great way of confirming understanding of the mathematical principles.

Getting bored with BASIC I found a nice book from Ian Sinclair (no relation to Sir Clive) about Spectrum machine code programming; thus prompting the purchase of assembler / disassembler software and yours truly getting into the inner workings of the Speccy.

The microcomputer enthusiasts were divided into a couple of camps. Acorn had produced the BBC Micro which was adopted by schools and was the computer of choice for kids from posh families. The Beeb had things like bit-mapped colour graphics, 3-channel sound and a built-in assembler (which probably very few owners ever used). Then there there was the ragtag of other micros such as the C64, Oric 1, Atari 800 and Vic 20. One lad at school got a Jupiter Ace and became an expert in Forth programming on a rubber keyboard.

I prided myself on being able to figure out neat little programs. For example if you wanted to copy games on the Spectrum, the easy way was to simply audio-copy the cassette which worked but gave you a lower quality copy and more chance the game would not load. The ideal way was to load the software into memory and save it to cassette. Generally the Spectrum games loaded from 2 or 3 separate tape files. The first would be a loader programme which loaded the other sections. The second a splash screen that loaded directly into the display file, then there would be the main software an finally a two-byte file which loaded into an area of memory which is updated every one-fiftieth of a second by the system clock. The final part was to stop the pirates copying the tape as the main software would check the content of the two bytes in memory and hang if they were not correct.

To be able to load and save the software, one had to know where in memory it was destined for. Spectrum files loaded in two sections – a preamble giving the memory address the file was to load to, its length etc and then the main data came in the second section. So I wrote a utility that disassembled the tape header and would load the main data section into a fixed area of memory. The trick then was to do a save to create a header pointing at the right area of memory then save the main data section. This also got around the problem of bytes being loaded into the system clock area.

As the Spectrum reached its limitations, I wanted to get a slightly bigger computer. I was into Z80 programming so the Beeb was out. Memotech were manufacturers of RAM packs and printer ports for the ZX81 and Spectrum; and they came up with a micro which was a geeks dream. It had 64KB RAM – bigger than the BBC, sprite graphics, multi-channel sound, built in assembler and all kinds of other goodies. The games houses overlooked it and Memotech eventually went bust but it was one of the most ambitious micros of the time.

At Uni, I took computer science and “graduated” to UNIX, C, and my first jobs involved working with communications stacks, drivers for things like optical disk drives and generally getting in at a quite low level.

As time went on, I got further away from straight development and got more involved with integration, deployment, configuration management etc and the early days stand you in good stead I think – being able to handle a command line; understanding scripting environments and having an idea of what is happening at the low level.

In my present role I have to support the tool CM Synergy for around 1100 developers in a large corporation and the support calls I get make me wonder what has happened to techies in recent years and this is where we finally get to the point of this piece.

Most of the developers work with IDEs – nothing wrong with that – and for them the idea of using a command-line is just totally alien. The other thing is they call me without first having read the documentation or online help. For a non-techie this is perhaps forgivable but for someone who purports to be a developer I find this rather strange behaviour. For example I had one developer call me the other day who did not know how to access the Help menu in a Windows application.

My fascination with computing stems from a curiosity about how things work, what they can do and how they can be adapted to do something different. Whenever I find myself in a new environment I take the time to explore the various tools and technologies in place and understand what they do. For example in the case of a new SCM or other development tool I find it important to see what it can do and how to get the best out of it.

Many of the developers and other techie folk I encounter seem not to have this curiosity anymore. They just want to put the blinkers on and type in code that may or may not work. If something appears not to work with the SCM tool, they take the attitude “well, it’s somebody else’s responsibility so I call them”. Sure, I have no problem if they have read the manual and have tried to figure it out, or there is some operation requiring more privileges than their user account allows.

More often than not the same people churn out crappy code – I have made thousands as a contractor fixing code created by some disinterested developer who was really little more than an overpaid typist.

What the computing world needs is people with an imagination.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.