Bring back the personal computer

Or is it back already?

I've now been exposed to video games and computering technologies for almost as long as I've been alive, which is nearly five decades at the time of writing, so won't be any fewer decades by the time you, my dear reader, are scrutinising yet another of my blog posts. As you can guess, I've seen lots of different technologies, from the Binatone Pong styled games, to the Texas TI99/4a (a robots game that I don't remember the name of) to the most modern days whatever it is that my favourite daughter plays on these ere games consoles.

Mentioning games consoles, I was never a fan. Whilst I saw some use of pocket or portable systems, the Atari Lynx, for instance, has allowed me many hours of escapism over the years. But dedicated consoles? Where was the keyboard? And why make such obviously powerful and useful technologies difficult to program? Okay, so I get the point that because home computers like the Sinclair and Commodore offerings could be programmed by anyone meant that whilst there was an abundance of software, that didn't mean you got quality releases. The big N, with its zealous control over releases for it's so-called Entertainment Systems might not boast nearly as many games as the working class ZX Spectrum, or the slightly more upmarket Commodore C64 - and even the "flash in the pan" VIC-20 managed nearly as many releases - at least each release was of a certain quality, right? I also found it rather puzzling that the company that rhymes with Tintendo (or that's how someone from t'north of England might pronounce it, well almost) had to have "official" magazines too, but as a scholar of Professor Marshall McLuhan, I know what he meant with his "The Medium is the Message" theory. Put a seal of quality on your game boxes, and then publish glossy literature to say how quality those quality releases are. Clever.

For me, the computer was always King, until the market stopped producing personal computers and started making the same thing in a different box, allowing monopolisation to take over so that ultimately corporations could benefit from the fact that the office computer was now also essentially the home computer (and also the dangers of that being the case too). But before I blame IBM or whoever for monopolisation, this happened early on in the UK market too, one might argue. Britain produced many computer systems in the early 1980s; offerings from Tangerine with its Oric, Memotech, Dragon Data, Acorn and Sinclair were just some of the companies slugging it out, and one might conclude that Sinclair won the first round, but was then absorbed into Amstrad. At least some plurality survived through the 1980s and into the early 1990s though. And Apple are still a thing today. At least it was there at the start thanks to the technical genius of Steve Wozniak. But Apple has mainly pioneered the high consumer price point, finding a niche that the standard PC could not compete in. The same could have been for the Amiga and Atari ST but for some dubious decisions at Commodore and Atari Corp. The Amiga was way ahead of the market when it came to graphics, and shouldn't have let that one slip, but somehow it did.

Anyway, I started this post thinking I'd write about one thing, and through some mental meandering I end up in a completely different place. I guess this happens sometimes. Like many of you, I miss the days when computers were more joyful and personal, and different machines had different strengths or weaknesses. The Amstrad CPC range for instance had... well I'm unable to think of any strengths for that particular system. But I found an entertaining 10 line BASIC game for the ZX81, which was a simple memory game. Of course, because it was BASIC, I had to do my refactoring to reduce the number of BASIC bytes it was using, then I made it so that the screen cleared between each level without adding a new line number, because that for me is what I love about computers. Or at least the computers from the 1980s. I'd say "bring back the personal computer", but in many cases some people already have; the MEGA 65, Ultimate64 Elite, Sinclair ZX Spectrum Next, Omni 128/128HD and the various offerings from Retro Games Ltd, such as THE400 Mini and THEA500 Mini (although neither have a working keyboard as standard, something I grumbled about above with games consoles, a USB keyboard is easy enough to add).