The Autistic Spectrum

Readers, I am beside myself.

I apologise that this post will only appeal to a select few. Bear with me, the rest of you.

The other day, I received an email from my Invernesian pal Jamie, with an attached picture labelled ‘Deliverance’. Expecting a light-hearted depiction of certain fun and games on the banks of the Cahulawasee (above-left), I opened it up in haste. I was confronted with the image above-right.

Depicted are the only 1000 copies of The ZX Spectrum Book 1982 – 199x in existence, one of which has been earmarked for your humble author. The order went in about a year ago, and has finally borne sweet, sweet fruit.

Might I be allowed a brief moment to reminisce about the ZX Spectrum? This loveable beast was a small, rubber-keyed affair, which you would connect to your television, a tape recorder and a temperamental power pack via a snake-pit of wires that would have fire-safety inspectors turning green at the gills. If you were feeling brave, you could try loading up a game. To do this, you would type in the mysterious incantation LOAD””, then pop the desired cassette into the tape recorder, and press Play. With luck, the game would be loaded after five minutes of tuneful digitised chuntering. During this time, you would sometimes be treated with a ‘loading screen’ to stave off boredom, and also to distract you from the possibility that the whole loading process could go belly-up at any moment.

A reasonable proportion of the time, you would then be playing a game. These were tremendously exciting in their own right, but imagine the extra tension generated by the fact that one nudge of the powerpack would reset the whole kit n’ kaboodle, and you would have to start again. Magic.

Anyway, I’m rambling now. I expect I’ll return to this topic at some point. Y’know, just to finish it off.

In the meantime, interested parties (perhaps the plural is a bit optimistic) may wish to visit the excellent World of Spectrum website to get themselves a ZX Spectrum emulator and a handful of the oldies to while away a quiet afternoon. Others may wish to take a closer look at the book that started this errant waffle, in which case they should head over here. The real die-hards will want to look at the RZX Archive, which contains loads of demonstrations which can be played on an emulator. You might even spot an entry from your humble author, in which he can be seen completing Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles.

Explore posts in the same categories: Books, Computers, Nostalgia