It started with a childs curiosity...

And grew into a hobby, a passion, a career, a life obsessed with computers and technology.

It all started innocently enough,  I was still in primary school, and at the end of each day I'd walk out of school, stroll down the hill and head straight into the pub.   Not to get a beer of course, that would come many years later.  No, this was where my mam worked as a barmaid and this was the late 70's and I was around 7 years old.  

This was a time when British pubs closed at 3pm and didn't open again until 7pm, so my primary school closing time worked out perfectly with my mam finishing up work for the afternoon.  I'd head into the bar where I'd be handed a lemonade with a dash of angostura bitters and a couple of cherries on a stick.  My mam would also pass me a handful of shiny tokens and I'd be left with a decision... put the tokens in the fruit machine and hope to increase my token count with a row of cherries, plums, or hit the jackpot with a row of bar symbols, or I could go through to the pool room where a shiny towering cabinet had recently arrived.

Space Invaders... This was something completely new, I hadn't seen any kind of arcade game before, so this cabinet full of light, movement and sounds blew my mind.  From the moment it arrived my addition to the fruit machine dwindled and instead my stack of tokens went into wiping out waves of aliens.

Then one day I walked into the pool room and it was gone... Space Invaders was no more... But what was this...Galaxian was stood there in its place... colour graphics, swooping aliens, more sounds.  I soon forgot about Space Invaders and set to honing my skills at this new challenge.   Over the coming years this pattern would repeat,  Pac Man came and went, Frogger, Moon Cresta ( still my favourite shoot-em-up to this day ), GORF, Donkey Kong, Scramble... I became a master of them all ( at least I believed I was! )

It was around this time that two other interesting developments occurred which cemented my love of gaming and technology.  

We acquired "off the back of a lorry" a Grandstand 3600 MK II - A pong machine that also had a lightgun and two shooting games.  This meant I could now play games at home - providing no one else wanted to watch the telly!  

And in 1980 I won a competition in the local paper, the prize, a Parker Brothers "Split Second" electronic handheld game - mobile gaming was born and I carried that game with me everywhere, including school, where this little brown box of wonder elevated my status - even one of the teachers would pull me up to the front of class and challenge me at the different games - I would constantly win and be supplied with chocolate biscuits as winnings.

So I was hooked, I had arcade games in the pub,  pong on the telly at home, electronic handheld games ( yes, i quickly acquired more - Entex Space Invaders, Donkey Kong Game and Watch, Gakken Puck Monster, Grandstand Pocket Pac Man, plus several cheap knock off brand games). But I knew I wanted more, I wanted to be able to create things myself.  

Then one day, the answer appeared... Now at middle school, I discovered that our French teacher had an office with a pair of Commodore PETs, one original 2001 model and one that was either a 4032 or 8032.  I quickly ingraciated myself with the teacher in order to gain access to his PETs.  I started learning BASIC (and played some games) and I quickly realized that this is what I wanted to do,  I wanted to work on computers!.

Then one day I noticed the head math teacher had received something interesting... three BBC-B Micros!  Here were computers with colours, sounds,and high resolution graphics!  You could make graphics that looked like arcade machines, or make sounds that sounded like an arcade!  Unfortunately me and the math teacher did get on and I had a different math teacher who had no BBC Micros, and no interest in. computers...  what was the young me to do.

One thing I knew was I needed more access to computers.  One of my friend's dads was the headmaster of a small primary school and had received a BBC-B for his home,  so I'd regularly visit said friend just to get a quick go on his Beeb, another friend had a ZX81, so I would pop over at any opportunity just to play 3D Monster Maze!.  

But I still needed more, I knew I needed my own computer....

Enter the computer...