Jason Slater Weblog

Unwrapping the packet to see that black glossy box with its red, white and blue highlights I knew I had found my calling. What I couldn’t believe even for some time after staring at it, daring not to open it, was that I, little me, had my very own computer. This was a Sinclair ZX81 computer - my parents couldn’t afford the ram pack but I didn’t care. My mom took me round the shop where she bought me my first copy of popular computing weekly - a black/white newspaper style magazine aimed at the newly developing home computer market.

Finally unpacking the machine and powering it on I was met with that little back flashing square - waiting for commands … from me. I slowly got to grips with the so futuristic keyboard it didn’t even have buttons just touch controls (ok I had to push them in and they were a bit clickey but I’m having a romantic flashback here!) and I was away typing in the first program out of the magazine - a short five line program that made a vertical scrolling game where I had to avoid the upcoming Os line by line. I was hooked.

Spending 24 hours a day in front of an old TV typing in huge amounts of numbers from ‘poster programs’ that used to be available was time consuming at best and frustratingly tricky at worst as sometimes after twenty odd hours of typing in the program would crash and I won’t have saved my work so far - because it took just too long to save, or I wouldn’t be able to make out odd characters on the print-out, or even from time to time the listing would simply be buggy. The first real game I got was by JK Greye software, a game called 3d Monster Maze which I still look back to fondly, soon followed up by games from Sinclair Research (remember Meteor!), Artic and Quicksilva.

I wrote a number of commercial games for the ZX81 before moving over to the ZX Spectrum, and briefly the VIC-20 and C-64 and even got a few TV appearances out of it. But those were the days my friend, those were the days.