I was born in 1971. I was lucky enough to have two older brothers with great imaginations. The oldest was into science and technical stuff, the next loved history and J.R.R. Tolkein, so I was exposed to a broad range of influences. Also, my Dad was very keen on history, liked talking about it and encouraged us to watch documentaries.
During long Summer holidays my brothers would invent a theme and all the local kids would participate. One year it was the spy club and we would use lemon juice to write messages in invisible ink etc. Next year it would be the Roman Army and we made shields and weapons and drilled with them and staged battles. We were eager foot-soldiers in whatever they were doing.
We were lucky to live near the southern edge of town. All the houses in our street were arranged around a large park. In Summer we played cricket and in Winter we played Australian Football. The bush started just behind our house and we spent countless hours in it, exploring, building forts and generally feuding with rival kids (often the Mungala Crescent gang [:D])
I constructed heaps of model aircraft and hung them from fishing line in my bedroom. I read voraciously (The Lord of the Rings when I was eight [;)]). We played Dungeons and Dragons. We camped. It was great. Personal computers were an expensive dream early on but my best friend was an only child and he was pretty spoilt. His parents bought him an Atari 2600 when they were new and then many cartridges. The fun we had on that was incredible. Space Invaders, River Raid, Pitfall...
When I was in my last year of primary school, there was one computer, a BBC micro, at the back of the class. I taught myself to program on it. When I was about 15, I was doing quite well at school and Mum and Dad decided to buy me a computer. I requested an Amstrad CPC6128, which came with a built in disk drive, colour monitor and a mind-numbing 128Kb of RAM. It had a much better BASIC than the Commodore 64 and the drive worked in seconds, whereas the C64's was the size of a Winnebago and took minutes to do anything.
I programmed that thing into the ground. I wrote graphics packages that used speech synthesiser software. I wrote programs to keep track of sport with all sorts of graphs and prediction functions. My crowning glory was a Where Eagles Dare inspired illustrated text adventure game where I used DATA statements to encode the graphics for objects you could collect, like an MP-40 sub-machine gun, and had a random landscape or room picture generator that constructed everything from triangles.
That said, I'd really miss a world without fast PCs and the internet. Wargaming and keeping up with science and technology is a big part of my life now.
Cheers, Neilster
The mighty CPC6128, playing The Sentinel...great game...I had that one...10,000 levels in 42Kb of RAM!
