Maecenas suscipit, augue eu iaculis euismod, dolor dui dictum nibh, quis semper nunc massa vel est. Integer egestas lacus gravida nec rutrum semper. Mauris egestas convallis. Suspendisse nulla eu.Back to the Future (of Computing)
It’s inevitable that in any conversation about video games there’ll always be some nostalgic reference to the early days of computing – not the very beginning but the the glory days of the ZX Spectrum, the C64 and the Acorn that marked the advent of home computing for the masses. Of course, I wasn’t around at the time since I only saw 11 months of the 1980s but it’s fascinating to look back on the hardware that made these machines possible.
An elegant weapon for a more civilized age – Obi-Wan Kenobi
Despite this, I was raised on the BBC Micro as – even in 1994 – we had a couple of these in our reception class complete with ‘floppy floppies’ and dot matrix printer. I think that’s when I got hooked on computing and no doubt you all have similarly fond memories of the first computer you used.
As you might guess, I’ve been watching Micro Men – the BBC docudrama detailing the beginning of the UK home computer market, personifying this through the business adventures of early pioneer Clive Sinclair and his ex-employee (and founder of Acorn Computers) Chris Curry. If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to track it down on the web.
In a fit of geekiness I splashed out and bought an EasyProp kit, which is the board in the post photo. It’s a development kit based around an 80MHz CPU with 32k of RAM and ROM. You get some modern niceties such as an SD card slot, Ethernet jack and VGA output. The coolest part though is the feeling that you’re stepping into the shoes of the early computing pioneers – no high-level languages here and you can leave your fancy booleans and strings at the door, thank you.
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I recorded the quick walkthrough above to give you an idea of what the board offers and it’s a pretty amazing feat to deliver that much hardware (essentially a fully-functional computing platform) for £120 – just a hair over the £100 that the ZX80 hit the market at.
Have a think about what you could write using this board. An arcade game? A text adventure? And that’s just the start – there are IRC clients, web servers, music synths, the works. That’s even before you look at the accessories you can buy such as accelerometers, GPS units and motors.
I’ll be posting updates about my first project (a text adventure game) over the next couple of months, along with source code for anyone with a similar board. In the meantime, check out this blast from the past:
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