Computers and Me

When I was a kid, I used to marvel that my parents remembered a time without television. It never occurred to me that I would witness a technological transformation of society that is comparable to the arrival of TV. (Whether it's more dramatic or less dramatic of a change is an open question. I can see arguments on both sides.)

I grew up without computers but I was always aware of them. They were a long time coming. They were standards of fiction long before they became part of the furniture of everyday life.

I think the first computer I ever actually encountered was a console with a simple table tennis game. It's the game the Americans call Pong. It couldn't have been more simple: a green screen, two vertical lines moving up and down the screen, and a white dot as the ball. The console hooked up to the television. I never actually played this, just watched other people playing it. I'd guess this was the early to mid eighties. (I can't find any photos where the screen is green. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong.)

Years later, my cousin (who was an only child and had the best of everything) had a games console; a Spectrum or Amstrad, I can't remember which. Again, I didn't get to play it, just to watch my cousin and older brother playing it. I can remember the title of some of the games: Sport of Kings, War of the Worlds, and Back to Skool. The last one captured my imagination the most, it featured a schoolboy getting into all sorts of trouble. It may have inspired a story (or game) that I developed at great length myself; The War in the School (I feel a bit pretentious italicizing it), which was an elaborate tale of a school battle involving peg-guns, catapults, pea-shooters, and other improvised, non-deadly weapons.

I remember these computer games took longer to load than to actually play. Aesthetically they were quite appealing, with their simple bright colours and very stylized graphics.

On another occasion, I can remember playing a handheld computer game for hours and hours. I'm guessing this was in the late eighties or early nineties. It was a device that you held up to your head and looked into like a pair of binoculars. The graphics and gameplay were very simple. It was a shoot 'em up in which you tried to shoot (or maybe harpoon) waves of shark attacks. They came faster and faster as you progressed. I remember playing it for hours, but not for days. Either I got bored of it or lost access to it.

Although this seems to be my first personal use of a computer, I don't remember being terribly excited about it.

My primary school had a computer, which kids were sometimes allowed to use in an after-school club. But it was very simple. The only game it had was an anagram game, and there were only a few anagrams so it quickly got boring.

When I went to secondary school, there was a computer lab and, from about fourth year (1994), we had a computer class. There was no internet connection. We didn't do much besides write CVs and play with a paint package. I remember we found the term "log off" amusing, being teenagers.

My family got a computer in 1994. It was a hand-me-down from a bank, my father edited a community magazine and somehow acquired it for this purpose. He never actually used it, that I can remember, and I'm not sure it was ever used much for the community magazine. But we used it plenty. It had Microsoft Works (I think), a simple word processor, spreadsheet, and database programme.

I lost no time in using it for writing. It was on this computer that I seriously started writing poetry, which isn't very romantic. I also wrote a diary of my fifth and sixth year in school (aged seventeen to eighteen), which I very much wish I still had. I can actually remember many things from this time simply because I wrote them in my diary, and often re-read it. The computer didn't have internet access.

We did find a computer game we could play on it, Sid Meier's Civilization. Tetris, as well. I can remember playing Tetris for hours and hours well into the early hours, while listening to Abba Gold.

I played another computer game, Shogun Total War, for sixteen hours a little bit later. After that, I resolved on no more computer games.

I can't remember when my family got a computer with an internet-connection. Email became near-universal (among young people) around 1997, I think. My access to the internet was occasional and situational for a long time. I remember the first website I visited regularly was the Philip Larkin Society website.

I didn't get a mobile phone of any kind, never mind a smartphone, until 2004. I vividly remember getting it. I'd just watched the remake of The Manchurian Candidate in the cinema in the Omni Centre, and I went straight from that to the Vodafone shop. I was clueless about mobile phones and asked: "Does it have texting?" The guy didn't even understand what I was asking. I can't remember when I first got a smartphone.

As I've said, computers were plentiful in the world of fiction, even when they were rare in reality. One of my favourite comic stories was called Computer Warrior, and it was a boy who went into his computer to play computer games for real. Another story I liked was The Thirteenth Floor, in which a computer called Max controlled an apartment building. (Wouldn't you know, he became overprotective towards his tenants, and people who came to the building with ill-intent found themselves on the thirteenth floor. But there was no thirteenth floor!) Both of these stories ran in The Eagle, though the thirteenth floor first ran in the short-lived comic Scream!

On the whole, I am all in favour of computers. Every technology has its downside. I don't remember people being more cultural or literate or imaginative in the pre-computer days, whatever they say now-- at least not in the pre-computer days that I experienced.