It’s amazing how much technology has changed – Rick Jackson

By Rick Jackson
Published 20th Feb 2019, 15:41 BST
Updated 20th Feb 2019, 16:45 BST
Rick is reminiscing about his first games machine. Picture: Shutterstock.Rick is reminiscing about his first games machine. Picture: Shutterstock.
Rick is reminiscing about his first games machine. Picture: Shutterstock.
My favourite story this week was of a man who was sifting through his parents’ loft after his father passed away and found his first computer that he bought for his 10th birthday in 1983.

He brought it downstairs, connected it all up and… it worked!

Hunting through more boxes, he found an old game on a disc.

Loaded it up and the computer asked if he wanted to ‘restore previously stored game’!

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This Apple II computer was quite rare in the UK but it reminded me of the time computer technology arrived in my life.

The first time I set my eyes on a game machine was in 1979. 

My uncle came round with a Grandstand video game machine. You loaded the bright yellow cartridge into the front and off you went.

The graphics were just simple lines on the screen and the sound effects consisted of simple blips, but we were mesmerised.

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It didn’t matter anyway, as we only had a black and white TV back in the 1970s with a portable aerial.

We’d spend hours playing Pong, tennis and Dodge It until the computer overheated and went pop one evening.

In 1984, I was the envy of my school chums.

Forget the BBC Micro computer, that Christmas I received an Atari 800XL PC from Santa!

This boasted 64K RAM of memory and had amazing graphics for it’s time.