The Brave New World

Sadly it was a brave new world I was completely unequipped for! 🤣🤣 I bought the ZX Spectrum 48k back in 1984 for the princely sum of £174.99. It was a huge investment on my part given my £300 monthly wage before tax, and an investment that my friends benefitted from far more than I did.

The ZX Spectrum was focused on games with its amazing full colour graphics. For younger readers of this blog you can look at YouTube for walk through videos or features like Top 10 ZX Spectrum games, and you are likely to be singularly unimpressed! For the time, however, they were amazing because the Spectrum name referred to the fact that the games were in colour, something made possible by the large 48kb memory, three times the size of the previous version.

The games were loaded via cassette using a long introductory tone to prime the computer then very fast bursts of binary tone that were read by the computer and turned into a game on screen. The two games I remember most are Pool, the only one I could play with any degree of success, and a game that put you in charge of a plane to bomb airfields, only a year and a half after the Falklands War that so obviously influenced it. My friends loved the game but I could never play it successfully. After about 3 months, the ZX Spectrum became a dust gathering white elephant that I ended up throwing away once I focused on my RAF basic training. Sadly, the computer age took off leaving me at the airport. I look back now and wish I had persevered with it more.