If you were lucky enough to have grown up in the 1980s, then I'm sure that you will share many of my memories and I hope that my website has stirred a sufficient degree of nostalgia in you. Perhaps you're a young, inquisitive scamp who's eager to find out what all the Spectrum fuss is about, or even a gnarled old codger who's trying to catch up with technology one step at a time. Either way, thanks for visiting and now allow me to tell you a little about myself and where this interest in computers, and specifically the Spectrum, came from.

My first introduction to computers came in 1979 at the age of seven, when my parents bought an Atari VCS for my sister and I. For the next few years we were entranced by such classics as Outlaw, Adventure, Asteroids and Night Driver. I ended up with quite a few games, which made me a very fortunate boy, especially as they cost around twenty pounds each - serious money back then. In those days, videogames were seen as home entertainment equipment, like televisions or videos, so new games tended to be sold by TV rental shops rather than WH Smiths and the like. Our local Radio Rentals sold them and whenever my mum popped in there on a Saturday morning to discuss washing machines or something, I would gaze longingly up at those big colourful boxes, always convinced - or at least hoping - that the graphics would look something like the elaborate artwork on the front. Naturally they never did.

In 1981, my mum bought me a ZX81. She'd heard that computers were the next big thing and was convinced that her son, who loved to know how things worked, would be fascinated by what this little black box could do. Unfortunately, I was just 9, and it was all a little too much for this computer virgin. I'd always had an image of computers being like they were on the television - super intelligent machines which could answer your homework and play games with you. But no, my mum said, computers will only do something if you program them. People take it for granted nowadays when they turn on their computer a series of applications will load up ready for their use. Not so in 1981. You were presented with a blank screen and it was up to you to make things happen.

After several weeks perched on the edge of my parents' bed, the ZX81 buzzing away on a stool infront of me, looking between the black-and-white portable, the bizarre keyboard and the impenetrable manual on my lap, I gave up. For a young boy, it seemed far too much like hard work to be entertaining. Back to the Atari's sounds and colour I went for another two years.

This was the time of the golden age of arcade games. Between 1978 and 1981, the world witnessed the likes of Space Invaders, Asteroids, Battlezone, Tempest, Missile Command, Pacman, Centipede, Bezerk, Galaxian, Scramble and the beautiful, wonderful, awesome, never-been-bettered Defender. As a young boy, arcade machines seemed to crop up everywhere. My local model shop, for instance, had a room off to one side that contained a few old games. One summer holiday I spent virtually every penny of my pocket money in there (and on Slush Puppies, as I recall). My friends and I used to sneak into the local sports centre because it had an Asteroids machine in the bar. Then there were family holidays, which were always a source of much games-playing action. In the Isle of Wight, I came across a Scramble machine that saved me a week of abject boredom and in Florida I discovered that tackling Defender and Tempest was just as fun as anything Walt Disney had to offer.

By the age of 11, such was my exposure to videogames that I was gagging to lay my hands on one of the new generation of home computers. I'd come into contact with a few different by now and it was time to make a decision. One friend had a VIC-20, another had a Commodore 64, but importantly, my neighbour owned a ZX Spectrum and being a couple of years older than me, when he said that this was the computer to have, I bowed to his sage-like wisdom. So for Christmas 1983 I asked my parents for a 48K Spectrum.

After taping a couple of games off my neighbour, I spent the next few months playing around with it and learning to program BASIC. It wasn't until my birthday four months later that my mum insisted that I bought a new game of my own. Off to John Menzies I went to cast my eye over the vast array of titles. I remember that only a year before there had been a fraction of this number of games. Things were certainly moving quickly. There were so many and I knew so little. To be honest I was almost put off the whole idea by my own ignorance. It felt like trying to join a French course half-way through, by which stage everyone else can speak the lingo. I decided to dive in though and for the princely sum of about six quid, I bought Fred by Quicksilva, based purely upon what the cover had told me. This experience made me realise that I needed a guidance on what games to buy. I decided to pick up a copy of the only computer magazine in Menzies' that didn't look like a flight manual for the space shuttle - Crash. Now there there was no turning back.

It was 1984 and new games, some great, most dreadful, were everywhere. Kids were taping games of eachother willy nilly and to hell with the piracy laws. The tape-to-tape facility on my stereo was as important to me as the TV. One friend even reproduced the colour coded security chart in the Jet Set Willy inlay using coloured pencils for me. Now that's a friend! This was the game too that was treated with the most reverance at school. POKEs (those little lines of code that could be used to manipulate a program) were whispered back and forth like national secrets. I remember scribbling down a JSW infinite lives POKE on about five different pieces of paper and stuffing them in various pockets and socks just to ensure that this piece of gold dust was not lost. It goes without saying that it didn't work. I discovered about three months later that it was actually a Poke for Manic Miner.

A year later, my Spectrum gave up the ghost. After months of keeping the computer working using folded up pieces of paper wedged under the power socket and nursing a keyboard suffering from post-Daley Thompson's Decathlon trauma, I conceded defeat and asked for a Spectrum+ for my birthday. Friends ridiculed its crap keyboard and I mocked their rubber abominations.

By now the pattern of my games playing life was taking shape. Most Saturdays I would visit the house of my best friend, Robert, and we would spend hours battling each other at every game imaginable. Robert hated losing with a passion, so he only played games that he owned and had spent hours mastering. The number of times I was thrashed at Matchpoint doesn't bear thinking about. Daley's Decathlon was always a ferocious contest and once he realised that I had the edge on him at Dark Star he soon tired of it. We even turned Lords of Midnight into a competitive game. He controlled Luxor and I ended up with the other lags who no one wants to fight with. Even The Biz and Football Manager were played as fierce contests, for Christ's sake. We had other interests, of course, but if I think back to the mid-Eighties my memories invariably lead me to Robert's house and the blessed Spectrum. If we weren't playing on the thing, we were looking for games at the local computer shop in Sunningdale, the Mikrogen shop in Bracknell, or at WH Smiths and John Menzies in Staines.

Robert and I regularly visited computer fairs, like the PCW Show, with its towering stands and hundreds of free posters with which to plaster our bedroom walls. I was always more of a fan of the ZX Microfair though. I missed out on the early ones at Ally Pally, but became a regular visitor when it relocated to the Royal Horticulatural Halls. With its bearded participants, car-boot-sale feel and its dank smell, it was far more of an enthusiasts affair and a place to go for bargains. Sure, the PCW Show was bigger and smelt better, but I was stung a couple of times by buying games that had just missed being reviewed in the latest magazines, but had, gosh what luck, been finished in time to be launched at the show. Only when I got the games home and had a go myself did I discover that they were shite.

By 1987, my Spectrum+ was in a bad way, suffering from power and aerial problems. When I finally got my hands on a Spectrum +2, I found it hard to believe that a better machine could ever be made. That is until a couple of years later when I received an Atari ST for Christmas. After so many years with Sinclair's old warhorse, I had gone back to Atari, where it had all begun. Despite plenty of bragging by Amiga owners about how their machine was better (and I suppose it was really), there was stacks of software for the ST and I contented myself with the knowledge that I had still never owned a machine made by Commodore.

My friend Robert followed me into ST ownership and our furious computer contests continued unabated. Our particular favourites were Kick Off, Oids and Empire. The joy of Kick Off was that if you also owned, as we did, Player Manager, you could design your own tactics. Thanks to the fact that he spent much of his waking life playing Kick Off, it goes without saying that, on the whole, Robert whipped me at it. Empire was an updated version of a very old exploration and conquest game. We would spend hours, days sometimes, battling for supremacy only for the computer to crash and wipe the game. Oh the joy.

While the 1980s drew to a close, my life beyond computers had become a little haphazard. My parents split up, I grew to loathe academic life and half way through my A-levels, I jacked it all in, having suffered one smug tutor too many. A brief flirtation with the Royal Navy followed during which I avoided becoming an officer by a whisker. In hindsight, I'm relieved that I hadn't spent the following three years on the high seas. Fate and all that.

So with my learning years behind me and my working life ahead of me, I stood at a crossroads. At least I had my old pal, Robert to have a laugh with. Or did I? I'd seen less of him in the past year. He had other friends from school who he liked to see and so I spent more time with another friend, Adrian, who introduced me to the magic of the pub and those fascinating creatures who occasion them: women.

The summer of 1990 was the last time Robert and I spent time as we used to: head-to-head battles on the computer and laddish high jinx. Bearing in mind we were now 18, I suppose it was only right that we moved on to more adult pursuits. Accordingly he went off to university and I went off to sign on the dole. What went wrong I wondered?

The following summer, we both joined the local cricket team which became a wonderful source of friends and entertainment for me. I saw Robert on and off for the next couple of years, but after that he got himself married and now lives up in London. We caught up again in 2002, after around seven years out of contact. We've seen each other a couple of times since, but it's tough staying in touch when you've got so used to being apart. You forget, you preoccupy yourself with the friends who are on your doorstep. It's a sorry excuse for not regularly catching up with a dear old friend, I know. I plan on putting that right soon.

With the turmoil of leaving my teenage years behind me, I drifted aimlessly for some time without an interest in the computer scene. The ST was fading, the PC was still crap, the sort of games on the consoles of the time were simply not my cup of tea. I'd occasionally plug in the Speccy for a crack at Rebelstar or Nodes of Yesod, but for the first time in nearly ten years, I had no knowledge of what was happening in the world of computers. I even had to stop and correct my family when they announced to anyone that I 'knew a lot about computers'. I should point out that to anyone other than the computer-illiterate, this grand proclamation actually translates as 'plays computer games and tinkers with BASIC', but in the mid-Eighties, this virtually made you a certified expert.

To keep my hand in I pulled out my mum's old Apple Mac, which she had used for work up until a few years earlier (interestingly, she used to run the Thompson Twins fan club - she used the Apple to maintain a database of the members). It's funny how the Mac, which was built in 1984, used icons and windows, while Microsoft only got in on the act about a decade later and yet you'd think MS invented the bloody things, the way they carry on.

Anyway, I digress. So as I was bumbling between unemployment and bad employment in the early Nineties, my contact with computers was minimal. When I landed an office job in 1992, computers on work desks were a rarity. I was one of the lucky ones and managed to teach myself (with a little help) how to use DOS. I compared it to the 8-year old Mac operating system that I'd been tinkering with at home and shuddered. Had we regressed twenty years in my absence? Was this the future? God help us all.

Gaming was about Mario and Sonic, neither of which appealed to me. They were just fancy versions of the same old platform games that had been about ten years ago. Everything seemed to be going stale. Then I played Tetris on a friend's PC and thought how strange it was that this ultra-simple game was more enjoyable than anything I'd played in years. Off the back of this experience, I bought a Gameboy and spent hours playing Tetris, F1 and Navy Seals (which reminded me of Rolling Thunder, an old arcade favourite of mine). Unfortunately, I also bought Kick Off, which I had adored on the Atari ST. On the Gameboy however, it was completely unplayable. Such was my frustration with it that one day I hurled the little Nintendo onto my bed. Sadly, my throwing arm, strengthened by years of cricket, was a little too powerful. The Gameboy overshot the mattress and shattered against the wall. Another phase of my computing life had come to an end.

With work, women, cricket and alcohol dominating my life, I had little time for computers until 1997 when my girlfriend of the time bought a laptop computer and her brother was good enough to load a couple of games onto it (using about a dozen floppy discs). They were Doom and Duke Nukem. Having used PCs at work I had a fairly good understanding of how useless they were and was expecting some God awful rubbish. This was something else though. I'd heard of Doom and marvelled at how bad and blocky its graphics looked compared to what I'd been used to on the Atari ST, but I was hooked nonetheless. As for Duke Nukem, it was like no other game I'd ever played. It was the sort of thing my friends and I would have come up with (if we'd had any programming talent beyond Spectrum BASIC). Within a year I had loaded a couple more games onto the laptop and was busily coming to terms with Windows 95.

Things stayed pretty much the same until early 1998 when I found myself working at Diamond Multimedia - you may have heard of their modems and graphics cards. On their PCs existed the much vaunted 'Internet'. Admittedly, the web was old hat by then, but having been a bit of a techno-recluse for a few years, I hadn't come across it yet. Nowadays, most peoples' first contact with the internet comes at work. My company previous to then thought of technology as the work of the devil, so I was not fortunate enough to have been in that position. Not at Diamond though. Their computers were connected to the web and I was instantly and utterly besotted by the thing. It was as though my entire life had been leading towards my discover of this magic medium. Well, perhaps that's going too far, but I was astounded by the seemingly infinite amount of information at my fingertips. So began a summer of doing very little work and learning everything I could about the web. I even began to learn HTML and started my own simple homepage. By the time I left Diamond a year later, I was a net veteran.

I knew that the time had now come to dig deep and buy my own PC. In February 1999 my girlfriend and I bought a new computer together - a swanky Dell Dimension PII 400 and it has held me in good stead ever since. I've upgraded the graphics card (a Diamond one funnily enough), but resisted the temptation to do anything more. In the meantime, of course, computers have soared ahead, making mine look positively ancient. Not that it bothers me. As long as I can still play Half-Life and surf the net, then it'll will do just fine.

So there you have it. My life with computers from beginning to end with a bit of my private life thrown in for good measure. There's probably plenty missing, but if you've bothered to read as far as this then I'll be bloody amazed, so I'd better not push my luck.

Anyway, onto the website you are reading right now. The inspiration came when I felt a nostalgic pang for the Spectrum a couple of years ago. If I'd thought about it five years earlier, I would have probably just grumbled about that bloody power socket. But once it was all a bit more distant and associated with my fading youth, I felt like paying tribute to it with a website. My first attempts were somewhat primitive but they were part of a learning curve that I'm still only about half-way up. Hopefully, this latest incarnation is a little easier on the eye and more informative too.

To start with it was a bit of a slog to be honest, but recalling old memories should be a happy affair and not about hard work. Therefore, in the Golden Years, I've taken my time to make it half-decent. I've enjoyed it too, thinking about my life in the early Eighties - reflecting on my schooldays, remembering when Christmases were about receiving and not giving, recalling those endless summer holidays, playing with friends, free from any worries. Those lazy, hazy days that still exist out there somewhere, across some sun-filled chasm. Hopefully, by doing what I've done here, I keep them alive.

Russell Tayler
August 2000