Colin Meeks

Life can sometimes play cruel tricks. One of these tricks is procrastination. Once you get into this funk, things can spiral out of control pretty quickly. This has certainly been the case with me, over the last year or so. To be more specific, I used to write like a demon. I wrote articles for the Podcast User Magazine, the Canadian national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, as well as a myriad of other paid gigs and personal projects, including Indie Launchpad, and my own site ColinMeeks.com.

Things slide ever so slowly. Slowly though, you start using an kind of road block as an excuse. I sat down to write with good intention, but this is not the way I usually prefer to work. I’m good with deadlines, but as the recession began to take hold, writing gigs became hard to come by. Without these kinds of pressure, writing became purely a personal thing. This however meant that with no real deadlines, things would take me forever to complete. I needed a way to work easily, when I had that creative spark, instead of getting a creative idea and then trying to write it when I had a free moment near my main desktop computer. I knew the answer to my problem would be a Netbook, but picking one up, is not that easy when your disposable income shrivels to nothing, ah the joys of kids.

Anyway I was finally able to pick up a Netbook on Wednesday and I can already feel the creative juices burning a hole in my brain. As I type this, I have two children playing in the basement, and another watching, “Meet The Robinsons”. In this little free time slot, I’ve already finished off an article that’s been sitting on my computer for a few weeks and am very close to hitting the post button on this one. I do have a laptop, an unwieldy, but very powerful 17″ HP Pavillion, but just the thought of setting it up, forces one of those road blocks in front of me. It’s a great laptop, but the battery has long since given up the ghost, which means that I constantly have to have it plugged in. Even before that I was lucky to get 2 hours of of the battery. In comparison the Netbook I bought has a battery life of up to 8 hours. This hasn’t been the case so far, as I’ve been installing software and also generally abusing the Internet connection, but once things settle down I imagine I’ll get at least 5-6 hours.

Anyway I shall write a post soon, with a review of my Netbook. I did a lot of investigation and feel the one I pick has been right for me so far.

I was half way though the second part of my Computer Odyssey series when I was reminded of a computer game I used to play on the ZX81. This is a game that’s haunted me for many years. I always knew it was called London Bridge, but the only thing I can remember of the author, was that he had a Polish sounding name. This also wasn’t an off the shelf computer game, but a program listing that appeared in a computer magazine. The only thing I was certain of, was that it appeared in Sinclair User magazine, sometime between 1982 and 1983.

After a bit of Internet research, I finally had the name of the author, Jerome K Laskowski. I was also able to determine that the listing appeared in the December 1982 issue of Sinclair User. Unfortunately although I have several thousand snaps of ZX81 games, this isn’t one of them, but I did manage to find several other games from Jerome, including, Deploy, Future War and Race Track. So for a while the trail was cold and I thought no more of it, until while searching eBay recently found a seller offering every issue of the Crash magazine in PDF format and not just crash, I found ZX Computing and numerous other magazines on offer. This led me back to the greatest Sinclair resource of all, World of Spectrum, or WOS as it’s more affectionately known and BAM, there I found my Eldorado, virtually complete scans of every magazine, for the discerning Sinclair afficianado. Tucked away deep in the bowls, was the December 1982 issue of Sinclair User. On page 67, London Bridge, by Jerome K Laskowski.

OK, so now I had the game, it wasn’t much good unless I could actually play it, which was easier said than done. I sat down to type in the listing using a ZX81 emulator, and while the single click keyword entry was certainly great on a real ZX81, it majorly sucked on a PC emulating a ZX81. I thought there must be a better way and fortunately there was, a program called ZXText2P, which allows you to take an ASCII document and convert it to the P format compatible with the emulator. Now I think I typed in 10 or so lines into the emulator and it must have taken me at least 15 minutes, as former ZX81 and Spectrum users will remember, you had to press key combinations to get keywords to appear. Typing it in as a pure ASCII document, I managed to type the whole thing in under 10 minutes. Being able to play the game for the first time in 29 years was nearly within my grasp, or would have been if there hadn’t have been a typo in the program listing. I keyed in my first move and all I got in return was an error, “C/220″, which didn’t mean anything to me. Fear not, I pulled out my PDF copy of the manual and it told be :

“The text of the (string) argument of VAL does not form a valid numerical expression. ”

This basically confirmed to be something that I thought when I was looking at the listing, that, what appeared on the listing as a “,”, should have been a “)”. Once I made this correction the program sprang to life.

Now while the program is still interesting, it’s not quite how I remembered it. The passing of time, can be such a cruel mistress, but I think with a little careful thought, it would be quite possible to update it and really bring it up to date. We shall see what happens over the next little while. This exercise has also caused a few sparks to go off in my head. More of that another time.

Up until the age of 12, I’d never thought about what I wanted to do with regards to a career. In 1980 a seed would be sown, that would grown and map out the rest of my working life. On visit to the school library one break time, I was idly thumbing through some magazines. Paris Match was always a favourite, with pictures of alluring European women and the odd grotesque scene like a murder, or the aftermath of a suicide, was rich fuel for a furtive, pre-teen mind.

Anyway while picking through the other magazines, I picked up a fairly hefty one and realised that it was one on computers. Back then, computers filled rooms and cost thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds. I didn’t know enough then to know smaller and cheaper computers were making an appearance, but this fact hit me square between the eyes, when I saw a full page advert for the Sinclair ZX80 computer. It was very small, white and about half the size of an A4 sheet of paper. At one end it was about 2 inches deep and the other about half an inch, which meant it kinds of resembled a wedge shape, with a lump on the thicker side. The keyboard was a very, visually interesting shade of blue, with white lettering. The technical specification looking back were laughable, but here was a computer anyone could afford, well nearly anyone. Every day I went back to the school library, thumbing now exclusively through the computer magazines, lusting after a computer of my own, but not really knowing why. I think I might have asked for a ZX80 for Christmas, but it was still a lot of money, especially for something that could have been just a child’s fad.

In 1981 Sinclair launched the successor to the ZX80, predictably called the ZX81, with all manner of technical improvements. The biggest differences to me, were that it was now black, which made it look very futuristic, and it was cheaper. I seem to remember the ready built version (yes it was available in kit form, for the adventurous) was £79.95, but Wikipedia seems to disagree. As soon as I saw an advert for the ZX81, I desperately wanted it. It was virtually all I could think of. Fortunately for me, I had a birthday coming up and my Mum and Dad gave me the money I needed. After school on the fateful day, I caught the 73 bus near my school with my friend Steve and off we ventured to the West End, more specifically Oxford Street, to Bourne and Hollingsworth, inside of which was a W. H. Smiths, then the main outlet for Sinclair stuff.

I gently cosseted my new ZX81 at the checkout, along with a tape called Super Programs 1, which looking back was astoundingly written by ICL, the then, huge corporation, which was later to be taken over by Fujitsu. Why they were writing games for the ZX81, I have no idea. Upon getting home and unpacking my new computer, the first thing that struck me was the manual, which was 212 pages and took the user all the way from setting up the machine to actually programming. I didn’t need too much help hooking it up to my 14 inch black and white TV, as I had already owned numerous games consoles. Well you can call them game consoles, but they are not quite in the same league as todays XBox 360′s, PS3′s and Wii’s.

Bizarrely enough, the thing that really stumnped me was getting the tape player communication to the computer. I’d type the LOAD “” command into the computer, press play on the cassette player and be greeted to 2 minutes of awful electronic screetching. When the noise stopped, my ZX81 did nothing, but sit there, as it had the previous 2 minutes. For some reason it took me a while to realise I had to plug the supplied cable into the cassette player. Even then it was all a little hit and miss, but eventually I had loaded in my first computer program, the impressively titled Invasion from Jupiter. The title was impressive, but the games was a very simplistic counting game. Several aliens ‘*’ were randomly drawn across the screen and you had to guess their position, by counting across the screen, then typing in the number that corresponded to the alien’s position. This might have been simplistic, but considering this was the first computer game (not console) that I’d ever played, it was mighty impressive for this 11 year old. I remember dragging my Mum and Dad into my bedroom to show them the awesome power that was my computer. I’m not sure what they made of it, but I think they knew I’d found something I was passionate about.

Time is an illusion, computer time, doubly so. I lost track of the nights, I stayed up into the early hours of the morning, working my way through the manual and typing in computer programs from the magazines that had been created for this new, emerging market. That being said a computer program written in BASIC, didn’t take too long to type in, as the basic ZX81 only had 1K of memory, the same technically as 1024 Characters, or about 5/6 of the first paragraph. Even this isn’t quite accurate, as the computer itself needed some memory to work, which left the user with about 800 characters. The ZX81 had a few tricks for squeezing the most out of that 1K. One of these was to tokenise the keywords, which took 1 byte, instead of say the 5 bytes needed to save the word ‘PRINT’. The best way to make the most effective use of the memory was to program in machine code, the language the computer could understand natively, rather than BASIC, which the computer had to first convert to machine language, which is the reason BASIC is much slower. Machine code is commonly referred to as a low level language, meaning you are at the lowest level to the computer. BASIC is considered a high level language.

I remember typing in an amazing space invaders style of program that ran in 1K, printed in the Your Computer magazine. There was row after row of hexadecimal numbers like, AE, 00, FF, CB, CD, 09, 15… You had to be extra careful with this kind of program. It was imperative that you saved the program to tape first, as a single wrongly typed character, could cause the computer to crash, losing everything if it wasn’t already saved. You could have struck me down with a feather when after saving the completed program, I ran it and it worked perfectly. This was a miracle in itself as typing on the ZX81′s membrane keyboard was a pain, quite literally sometimes.

As I learnt more and more, I began pushing the ZX81 until it kept running out of memory. I managed to get the necessary funds to purchase a nice new 16K ram expansion pack, which I think cost about £49.95. Suddenly a whole new dimension of game-play presented itself. Unfortunately, so did the dreaded RAM pack wobble. Many times I can remember typing in a program and forgetting to save, then having the ZX81 crash as I inadvertently touched the RAM pack, or nudged the ZX81, causing the RAM pack to wobble and the ZX81 to reset itself, losing all my unsaved work. Clive Sinclair’s solution, was to use a bit of velcro, which I only found out about recently while watching a documentary drama, based on the kind of feud between Chris Curry, head of Acorn and Clive Sinclair in their race to be the BBC micro. Not really the kind of thing you want to hear from the head of a company, to who you just gave your hard earned money. For some reason I never did anything to alleviate myself of the RAM pack wobbles, but fortunately it wasn’t something I had to suffer for very long anyway.

I remember one day dragging my Mum and Dad to one of the unmissable events on every Sinclair enthusiasts diary, the ZX Microfair, this one held at the Royal Horticultural Hall in London. There I saw an amazing full action keyboard, which my Mum and Dad treated me to. Unfortunately the company Fuller, didn’t have any at the show on that day, so I had to return the following to to pick it up on my own. My new keyboard also had the added bonus of curing the RAM pack wobble.

I went to many ZX Microfairs, at the Horticultural Hall, and later at Alexandra Palace. In fact I was also an exhibitor at one ZX Microfair, working for the Micromania Software Shop, which used to be on Caledonian Road. Working at that shop was a blast, but more of that later.

One of the amazing things about the ZX81 is that it had no sound and no high resolution graphics. These limitations however did not stop people coming out with creative ways to overcome these limitations. For sound someone realised that if you switched the computer multiple times between SLOW and FAST modes, and turned up the TV’s volume, you could get the ZX81 to make a tone. Painstakingly, people began writing music for the ZX81, to be played this way. I think my most memorable was a rendition of Beethoven’s 9th, which seemed to be a piece of music used a lot on computers.

Using some low level creativity, it was even possible to boost the ZX81′s graphic resolution from a blocky 64×48 to an impressive 256×192. However high resolution games came relatively late in the ZX81′s life by which time most people had moved onto the ZX81′s successor, the ZX Spectrum, which had a native resolution of 256×192, all in colour, but not without it’s own limitations.

Looking back, I really wish I would have kept my ZX81. I sold it to Wayne Robinson from school, for 50 quid I think it was. Be interesting to hear what he did with it. Is it languishing in a closet somewhere? In the years since, I’ve owned a few ZX81′s. Unfortunately when I left the UK, I sold all of my retro machines, as they would not work over here in Canada, with the different power supply of 110V, instead of 240v and the different TV standard, NTSC as opposed to PAL. I did pick up a Sinclair/Timex TS1000, which is the North American equivalent of the ZX81.

So that’s how I got into computers. The next part to this series will be about the ZX Spectrum. I hope you enjoyed reading this, I’d love to hear about your first computers.