Are you keeping up with the Commodore...

So here I was again, wanting to upgrade my 48k Speccy for a shiny new Commodore 64.  It was a tough decision,  back then there was a definite divide,  you were either a Sinclair fan, the home grown rubber keyed wonder,  or you were a Commodore fan,  this brash, American upstart invading our shores.   Yes, there was also the Amstradites, the Acorn admirers, the Dragon devotees, but really, it was all about Sinclair Vs Commodore,  Speccy vs C64.  These were the two leading systems and jumping ship from one band of merry men to the other was not to be taken lightly!

But it was meant to be,  we'd recently moved house, from the rural idyll of Northumberland to the Scottish borders.  I was cut off from all my old Spectrum owning friends, and my new best friend was a C64 owner!  This was perfect,  We would both buy new games and swap with each other when we got bored.  We would spend hours at each others houses either playing games or trying to write new ones.   Another friend at school was also into developing games and soon had his first game published.  More and more I was convinced that this was the career path for me.

The school career advisor had different ideas though... ironically ideas generated by a computer program!  My school at this point had BBC-B's and Masters everywhere, and were starting to get some fancy RM Nimbus systems. My career advistor had a BBC Master that he was using to run a piece of software that was designed to identify what career you would be best suited to.  You completed a long questionaire, the computer would then spit out what it thought was the job for you, what qualifications you would need to achieve, and what further education you would need.

Sawmill worker...only required qualifications were basic maths, english, and woodworking.  No further education needed.  Leave school on the Friday, start cutting up trees on the Monday.

I was disappointed,  I was expecting it to say "Top Games Coder", "Computer Game Artist", "Video game designer" or something similarly futuristic, but no, this computer program saw me working manual labour in a wood yard, chopping up trees, getting muddy, and stinking of creosote.

I should mention at this point that me and education didn't always get along.  While at school in Northumberland I had taken to skiving off on a fairly regular basis,  so much so that I got moved to a boarding facility at another school further south in the county where they would walk you to school every morning to make sure you went.  Upon moving to Scotland I was put in the first year of High School, where I noticed that most of the lessons were teaching things I'd already learned at middle school in Northumberland, a year or two earlier.  I also noticed that a girl I was at school with in Northumberland was now in the year above me.  

Well that made me want to just skive off school again... why bother going to learn stuff that I already knew?  So I would set off in the morning as if I was going to get the bus to school, but instead would just hide out until I saw my parents leave for work, then I'd scurry home and jump on the computer, teaching myself things I saw as important... 6502 assembly, sprite design, smooth scrolling techniques!

Well that couldn't last forever, eventually the school took notice and when I continued to avoid going to school I was expelled and enrolled at another school a little further away, which happened to be the school my best mate went to... as his dad was the headmaster!   I gave it a go for a while, but this time they put me back up a year to where I should have been in the first place, but put me in all the highest level classes where I struggled, especially with math and English... yep, English kid in Scotland, struggling with English!

So the skiving started again and I was again expelled.  Now I had a social worker!  She would pick me up in her little Morris Minor, drive me to this community centre where we'd play pool and discuss my issues.  The decision was made to place me in a childrens home where I would be forced to return to the first school again...albeit in the year above what I was originally in.   Well I wasn't happy with this decision and one day while she was driving me to the home, I grabbed the handbreak and legged it.  Police were called, and Scotland's finest, PC Turnbull turned up, cuffed me and put me in the back of his police van. Dropping me off shortly after at the childrens home... I made quite an entrance that day!  I'd also have a number of other run ins with PC Turnbull over the coming years...

So here I was, in the home with a bunch of other misfits... glue sniffers, thieves, kids with aggression issues, abuse victims, you name it, they were there.   I did make some good friends in there, and it was a turning point for me education wise.  Now back at school, I made smart choices as to the classes I wanted to take - computing ( naturally! ), Art, Technical Drawing, and Craft ( woodworking, metalworking ).  I also chose Chemistry, but that was more to do with the fact that I liked burning things and making things explode... but that's a whole other story.

My computer teacher was excellent, Mr Torrance, if you're out there, thank you!,  my art teacher, not so great.  She constantly tried to get me to drop out of art as I "would never be an artist".  My Tech drawing teacher was excellent and tolerated my slightly messy drawings and my craft teacher, Mr Rafferty was also superb.  He let me bring a large sheaf knife into school to work on it in craft and make a new handle for it... can you imagine a kid being encouraged to bring a knife to school these days?

Also while at school, there was a nearby centre specializing in computers and tech, the TVEI centre.  Once a week I'd get to go there to do additional computer studies - there was just me and one girl who chose to do this... I guess we were the geekiest in the school.   The TVEI centre also had a full CNC lab setup where you could learn CNC machining.  While I did find that cool, being able to program all these machines using simple computer interfaces, I was more interested in programming graphics and animation, so spent my time there concentrating on that.

Now while all of this was going on, there was a new kid in town... and that kid's name was Amiga...

Next : Only Amiga Makes it Possible...