When I was a kid growing up in the 90's I was vaguely aware my Grandma and Grandad would augment their living by selling bits and bobs at markets and car boot sales across Yorkshire. I didn't take much notice until one day I saw my two uncles setting up a micro computer on the dining room table of my Grandma's house. I can't remember the game they were testing but I think it was a smurphs game loaded off a cassette tape. I was deeply intrigued but I don't think they let me have a go! This is possibly my earliest memory of video games. I can't recall anything earlier. Undoubtably however, in that moment I was drawn into a world of colourful pixels that I didn't understand. The possibilities of what might exist in that world were endless.
Time passed and I remember (if I digress away from micro computers for a moment) my sister getting a Sega Mastersystem 2 one Christmas, which we mostly played on a small black and white CRT TV up in our bedrooms. Only on special occasions would we be invited to set it up on the colour TV in our living room and we'd be awestruck. Up until then we could only guess at what colour each sprite should be and upon viewing them in colour for the first time we would discover we had guessed wrong about many of the colours. I eventually (probably the following Christmas) got my own Mastersystem 1 and that's probably when I truly became a gamer. Alex Kidd, Safari Hunt and Space Gun, among others, being some of my earliest memories with the 8-bit console.
One day not too long after this, my Grandad gave me a Tandy TRS 80 Color Computer. It had no cassette loader and no data cable. It was just the machine, power lead and probably the video cable to connect it up to a CRT. I thought it was a piece of rubbish! Every thing I typed in would result in an "SN ERROR" every time I hit the return key. I had no idea it had loaded into BASIC. This was beyond me at that time.
I remember my Dad noticing me and my younger brother crowded round the TRS 80 one afternoon doing things like copying pages from books onto the screen and trying not to use the return key whilst doing this. He sat down and typed something like "PRINT TOM".
"Why are you doing that? It doesn't have a printer!"
A few moments later it made sense when the computer responded by displaying the word "TOM" on the screen.
"You need to program it," he said.
That's when we dug out the manual for the machine, that we had cast to one side dismissively when first we came upon the thing. That's when I entered the world of programming in BASIC.