A 1980s Childhood (15 page)

Another major step forward in telecommunications technology was the widespread adoption of the fax machine which had started to appear in businesses in the late 1970s and had become ubiquitous by the 1980s. Think about how many emails you get every day at work and then remember that businesses in the eighties were not using email yet and you may appreciate just how useful the fax machine was for sending documents around the world. Every office had at least one fax machine and it would be working round the clock sending and receiving important documents. To reduce ink costs, thermal printers became popular, using a heated printing head to ‘print’ on to heat-sensitive paper thereby completely eliminating the need for printing inks. The only trouble was that the thermal paper tended to fade rapidly and any text printed on the paper gradually vanished over the course of a few years.

OK, that’s already too much information about fax machines because, let’s face it, they’re supremely dull in comparison to what was probably the single most important technological development of the 1980s – the Personal Computer (PC). I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear that I’m not going to provide you with a detailed history of the personal computer, although I could probably write a book on that subject alone. I’m one of those geeky guys that knows way too much about computers and I’m one of the few super geeks who has actually made the pilgrimage to the famous suburban garage in California now dubbed ‘the birthplace of silicon valley’. Here, Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard began their electronic tinkering many years ago which ultimately led to the invention of the PC.

So I’ll try to keep my inner geek in check now as I recollect a few of my memories of computers in the 1980s, starting with the Atari 2600, a kind of 1980s version of an X-Box. One of my friends had an Atari 2600 and this was the first time I had ever seen any kind of computer or computer game. The Atari comprised a large wood-panelled box with a slot to insert games cartridges and a socket for a joystick. You plugged the Atari in to your television and then played games such as Pong, Pac-Man and Breakout, and as far as I was concerned, this was the best thing in the world. I desperately wanted my own Atari right there and then but had to wait patiently until a kindly uncle bought us a ZX Spectrum some time later.

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum, or Speccy as it became known, was a small black box mostly comprising a built-in keyboard with keys made of rubber that wore out very quickly. Games were stored on audio cassette tapes and to load a game you would type LOAD and then press the play button on a cassette player connected to the Speccy. The screen would flicker with brightly coloured horizontal bars as a loud screeching and whistling noise was heard from the audio tape. Anyone who has ever used a ZX Spectrum will have the tape-loading screeches indelibly burned into their memories, and they will remember the frustration of having to wait for five whole minutes while Manic Miner loaded, only to find that thirty seconds from completion the screen would display the crushingly inevitable ‘R TAPE LOADING ERROR’ message that meant you had to start all over again.

Fortunately, you could usually fix this problem by simply adjusting the volume level on your cassette player and eventually you would get to play Jet Set Willy, Horace goes Skiing, Dizzy, Head Over Heels and hundreds of other classic computer games. There was even an early word processor for the Spectrum and most impressively a flight simulator, which I find truly amazing with hindsight given that the ZX Spectrum had just 48KB of memory and a 3.5MHz processor. Sadly, the Speccy wasn’t built to withstand the destructive force of me and my two brothers and it wasn’t long before we had worn out the rubber keys on the keyboard and had worked our way through numerous joysticks, largely thanks to the game Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, which involved waggling the joystick from side to side as fast as it could go.

I loved my old rubber-keyed Speccy. This is a 48KB model like the one I had in 1982.
(Courtesy of Bill Bertram/Wikimedia Commons)

Our next computer was a ZX Spectrum 128K which was not only more powerful but featured a built-in cassette player. We had now also bought a special plug-in device called a Multiface that allowed us to apply POKEs which were a way of cheating in games. For instance, you could press a special red button on your Multiface and then type ‘POKE 47196, 201’ and this would give your character immunity in the game Knight Lore. The good folks at
Your Sinclair
and
Sinclair User
magazines provided us with new cheat codes each month and also gave us cover-mounted cassette tapes loaded with samples of new games.

My brothers and I began spending so much time playing computer games that my dad decided to implement a strategy to limit our computer use: the strategy allowed us to use the computer for the same amount of time that we spent reading an educational book. It was a nice idea but it didn’t really work since we each had a reading log and would try to build up as much time as possible for playing computer games by pretending to read when we were, in fact, playing games silently in our bedroom. By this time we were also playing computer games at school on the new BBC Microcomputers which, like Betamax VCRs, totally confounded most of the teachers and yet were fluently operated by a class of 6-year-olds.

The BBC Micro was one of the first computers to appear in schools and was powerfully packed with a whopping 2MHz CPU and 16KB of RAM costing a tidy £235 in 1981. For those of you who don’t understand geek speak, that means your home PC today is well over a thousand times more powerful than the BBC, and in relative terms, less than half the price. But despite its seemingly modest specifications, the BBC Micro was a hugely advanced personal computer for its time and was, without a doubt, one of the most influential computers of the eighties.

Since there was only the one computer at my first school, it was very much in demand and consequently each child had limited access to it. We would take it in turns to play semi-educational games such as the well-known Podd, which was meant to teach young children to use verbs. The game featured a strange character called Podd that looked like a tomato with a face. You had to complete the sentence ‘Podd can …’ by adding any one of 120 verbs, such as dance, sing, whistle, run, etc. and then watch as Podd demonstrated each of these actions with a rudimentary animation. The animations were extremely basic and many of them looked confusingly similar. I’m not entirely sure there was any real difference between Podd’s walk, stroll, amble, meander, saunter and mince.

If you don’t remember Podd, there’s a good chance you’ll remember Granny’s Garden, and maybe you still suffer nightmares at the memory of the pixelated cyan face of the evil witch that would inevitably catch you at every turn. The idea of the game was to wander through the mysterious Kingdom of the Mountains solving puzzles and searching for the King and Queen and their missing children Tom and Esther. Along the way you would encounter a talking toadstool, numerous witch attacks and a sneezing Asian character called Ah-Choo, who needed your help to feed some baby dragons. I never actually completed the game and got bored of it because the witch kept eating me; instead, I would spend my computer time writing things like:

10 PRINT ‘BUM’

20 GOTO 10

Before long the Amiga 500 and Atari ST were both released, competing directly with each other and both offering game play far more impressive than anything I’d seen on a Speccy or BBC. My dad was somehow persuaded to buy us an Amiga since I told him it would be used for educational purposes; he even bought me a dot matrix printer to go with it so I could write my school essays and print them out. Of course, the Amiga was rarely used for educational purposes and was instead used as the high-performance gaming machine that it was. The Amiga came with a built-in floppy disc drive that meant your games would load within seconds and it had a whopping 512KB of RAM expandable to 1MB that allowed for highly detailed graphics and rocking soundtracks. The Amiga was the last computer I owned in the eighties and was a fitting conclusion to a decade of countless technological achievements.

By the end of the 1980s we not only had really cool computers but we had CDs, VCRs, camcorders and mobile phones, too. Technology in the eighties had touched every area of our lives and changed the way we worked, communicated, listened to music and watched TV, even the way we ate (think of the microwave oven). And you know what? Technology also gave me the chance to have a go on a hoverboard after all. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but thanks to my trusty Amiga 500 I got to ride a virtual hoverboard in
Back to the Future II
the computer game!

How do you solve a problem like Noel Edmonds? I mean, he was clearly one of the most famous personalities of the 1980s in the UK but his celebrity status spans at least five decades, so does he really count as an eighties celebrity? His haircut and dress sense don’t help with his classification either, since they have remained consistently timeless throughout his entire career, unrepresentative of any particular decade. And in terms of popularity, he’s probably just as well-loved today as he was back in the seventies, but there’s definitely something eighties about him. It’s like Caramacs and Curly Wurlys. There’s just something about them that seems retro, despite them still being available today. Mars Bars, on the other hand, have been around for even longer, but for some reason they never feel dated. Noel Edmonds is a Caramac in the world of celebrity and he is joined, in this regard, by many others whose long careers make it virtually impossible to neatly assign them to any particular decade.

So it is without apology that I present to you a hand-picked selection of famous people from the 1980s, some of whom are Caramacs and some of whom are Mars Bars. There are one or two Cadbury’s Fuses here (people who were hugely popular for a few years and then disappeared without trace), but I’ll start you off with an ice-skating couple I like to think of as Wispa Bars (big in the eighties, who then disappeared into obscurity before making a surprising comeback years later).

British, European, Olympic and World champion figure skaters Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean are widely regarded as the UK’s most famous and successful ice dancers of all time. In 1984 they were relatively unknown until they performed their now-famous routine at the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. The four-minute performance won them a standing ovation, a gold medal and a record-breaking score of twelve perfect sixes, and from that moment on Torvill and Dean became household names.

The pair first skated together in 1975 when they were paired up by their coach and they began winning competitions immediately. Before turning professional, the pair had to fit their demanding skating practice and competition schedule around their careers, since Jayne was an insurance clerk and Christopher was a policeman, both living in Nottingham. Things started to turn around for Torvill and Dean when they took on the actor and singer Michael Crawford (of
Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em
and Phantom of the Opera fame) as their mentor in 1981. Crawford gave them acting lessons in order to heighten the performance of their figure skating and tagged along with them to sit at the ringside during their famous Bolero performance.

To coincide with their ten-year anniversary as professional figure skaters, Torvill and Dean decided to return to professional championships for the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, where they performed a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers-esque
Face the Music
routine. Although they didn’t sweep the boards with perfect 6.0s for this performance, they were placed at a respectable third place behind gold winners Grishuk and Platov (who ended up winning gold medals four years running).

Despite their disappointing finish and the realisation that they were no longer Olympic gold winners, Torvill and Dean set off on their own ‘Face the Music’ tour. Christopher Dean also choreographed a number of dances to the songs of Paul Simon for the English National Ballet and toured with the ‘Stars on Ice’ show. In 1998 they produced a show that was performed at Wembley Stadium called ‘Ice Adventures’.