|
|
||
|
REM **START OF DIALOGUE** LET a=2 : DEC a My introduction to computing came via a friend of mine, Simon Round, who had a Commodore PET. Home computers were a very rare thing back then and it was a wondrous thing to behold. Though quite what I was beholding was difficult to appreciate then.
(Oh yes, Dodgy RAM Pack and sparky printer it's the ZX81) I remember being at a house of a friend when I read with glee the two page red, black and white advertisement by Sinclair electronics for the ZX81, Launched around 1981 I believe. I think I remember it retailing for around £65. I wanted one. A friend had showed me how to run the: - 5 PRINT "Peter" 10 GOTO 5 program and I was just desperate to do it my self at home. I can't remember how I raised the money to buy it but buy it I did (My dad probably bought it in actually) and off I went as a programmer. First problem, I couldn't program aside for filling the screen full of "Peter". I started buying Popular Computing weekly and various others from the newsagents and carefully typing in each of the examples they had on their user submission pages. Every now and again I would reach the end of an example and the ZX81 and the 16k RAM pack would still be intact and have not crashed. Eagerly I would save the software to a tape and start playing around with it. Over time after playing with various bits of software and referring to various manuals I quickly became quite a competent BASIC programmer. GOSUB BUY_SPECTRUM Filled with enthusiasm I upgraded to a ZX Spectrum.
(Seven colours, cool graphics and Z80 Zilog processor!) High level language was not enough though and quickly I moved into assembly language programming. Having purchased the bible of Z80 programming and the Spectrum ROM disassembly. I was off. I did all sorts of daft things. I even wrote a speech recognition program but due to the memory limitations it would only recognise three words. But it was the achievement that was the thing rather than the practicality. I formed a programming partnership with a good friend of mine. We would write either games or more famously (and what we are remembered by retro gamers for) editors for popular games together. It was this that launched me into my first commercial venture. Selling software via mail order. We
wrote lots of software but it was the editors that received some
excellent reviews and were critically acclaimed. We wrote game editors
for some of the top ZX-Spectrum games around in the early eighties
including:- Chuckie
Egg, Hungry Horace (Original program and DJIS (Decrement jumped if sued) We
were sued on several occasions as, for example, a competition was
running on Jet Set Willy for
|
Also Ashby computer graphics who branded their games "Ultimate". Were particularly peeved when we released a re-designer for Knight Lore. This game was a revolution in design for the Spectrum because it had 3D Isometric graphics. It was considered real leading edge stuff. The loading mechanism of the game made it difficult to copy. But our software would allow you not only to load our software on top of the game to redesign it, but then save a new re-designed version to play later. We released a version of this that ACG were determined to stop us selling. Another lesson learnt, Lawyers are like nuclear weapons. Everybody needs them but when you use them they f**k the whole thing up!! (Thanks Danny De'Vito for that quote). Mark often contributed to "Crash" magazine with cheats that you could perform in a variety of games and between us we hacked the whole software universe and operating systems over the course of some very long nights and days. I learnt some key business fundamentals
during this period. We were both technically lead to start with
and POKE #A1A My first ever business venture and our first active marketing of our software was in the back of Popular Computing Weekly in May 1984. We placed a small worded advertisement in the classified adds for our software. Later that week the cheques came pouring through the post. Yipee, I wish I could do that now, Oh how things have changed!!!
(Never before has so little started so much!) I went on to write a variety of languages both high and low level assembly across a variety of machines, generally Z80 & 6502 and later 8086 variants. I decided to develop my career in sales and marketing and Mark went on to be a full time programmer and works in the city of London now. He was always better than I and it sounds like he is doing an excellent job for the firm he currently works for. Our time together was short lived but excellent fun. We still keep in touch and every now and again our efforts are remember on some retro gamers site on the Internet. I currently write in Perl, HTML, JavaScript and Visual basic / VB Scripting. I only program very infrequently now. I tend to reserve my energy’s for the application of these skills to business functions, process and decision making. My career has often been punctuated by a few bouts of creativity. I just can't shake the programming bug.
REM **END TOPIC** DJNZ a HALT
|
|
spent a lot of time developing leading edge software. A primary
issue with this is that without good sales and marketing a lot of
effort was lost. As I learnt, you did not need the most technically
wonderful software to succeed. Generating demand for your products
and managing the sales, marketing and production were equally if
not more important. Also as soon as we had moved to fill the gap
in the market that we saw, competitors moved in quickly behind us
as well as pirates. 
