Young people today, with their smartphones, social media and complicated shoes, don’t know how lucky they have it.
The phones we all carry around in our pockets are now so powerful we think nothing of being able to access the internet, watch movies or take photos at any time and, depending on the wi-fi, in any place.
All of this was unimaginable 35 years ago when Timex workers were putting together ZX Spectrums, the beloved home computer that found its way into more than a million homes during the early 1980s.
Back then, the internet itself — a worldwide repository of information, cat pictures and pornography — sounded more like something you would read in a William Gibson novel than anything we would see in our lifetimes.
Abertay University is celebrating the role of those Timex workers — mostly women — at a special event at Camperdown Park next month.
The open air multi-media installation Generation ZX(X) will look back at the role of these workers and explore how Sinclair Spectrums inspired a new generation of game designers.
It will also, inevitably, press “LOAD” on a truckload of nostalgia for those of us who remember the time when we lived in a world where games had to be loaded up from a cassette or, for the particularly masochistic, painstakingly typed out in code, line by line.
Even then there was no guarantee it would actually work.
If Generation ZX(X) wanted to replicate the feeling of being a Speccy owner, they should make everyone queue for 10 minutes to get in then tell them the event has crashed and they need to go back and start the whole thing again.
The real importance of Generation ZX(X) wasn’t that idiots like me spent large chunks of our childhoods addicted to games like Jet Set Willy and looking down on Commodore 64 owners, it was that those machines found their way into the hands of a generation of people interested in programming themselves.
In Dundee, the easy availability to Spectrums — and let’s not ask too many questions about that here — led directly to the creation of games like Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown and the birth of am entirely new industry for the city — and Abertay’s pioneering video game courses.
Not bad for a machine that came with rubber keys and — at the top end — 48k of memory.
