Old Tech – New Tech – Laser 200

As I was the youngest in the family, it was thought that to have my own Computer would be a bit too over the top…I mean “He’s just a Kid”. I was about 11 at the time and just started Secondary School, where I had ‘Computer Lessons’. I can still remember the first lesson…I sat at the back of the class and the Teacher started to introduce himself to the class and gave an outline of what we would be doing.

He then started to talk about Computers and gave a brief description and stated “they run on BASIC”…”Does anyone knows what BASIC means?”…ha hah…it was my chance…you see, I’d already wrote programs, or should I say input them from magazines…with complete silence in the class, I raised my hand…”Yes…what is it?” while pointing at me, “Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code” I answered with complete confidence! The other kids looked at me like I was ‘Teachers Pet’ and the Teacher looked a little amazed that some average looking kid in a not so great Secondary School…new the answer…but I did!

Christmas then came and to my delight, I got my first and very own Computer…Enter the Laser 200! The what? Yeah, it kind of fell under the Radar a little, but it was all mine. I had a Cassette player with it and plugged it into the spare downstairs TV. It was better than the ZX81 my Brother had, because it was in colour and had sound, plus it had a ‘Hi-Res’ mode. It had a whopping 4k of memory and came with a few games on tape.

I loved it, small rubber keys that beeped when you pressed them and looked great. I had to wait for the January sales (yes, back then, they actually happened in January) to use my Xmas money to buy some more games and a RAM pack. Now…bear in mind this was nearly 30 years ago, but you just have to trust me on this…Imagine having about 6 or 7 DVD cases stacked on top of each other and you get close to the scale of this extra memory. “How much extra did you get?” I hear you cry…wait for it…16k! Yep, 16k.

This gave me access though to some better games…of course there was Chess, for some reason every new Computer came with Chess, but there was a game that used the ‘Hi-Res’ mode (basically, the blocks were a little smaller) and cannot for the life of me remember what it was called, but I can only describe it as a ‘Man’ on top of a high rise, shooting things into Buckets below…unfortunately, it didn’t really look like shooting…it was more like an electronic ‘Stickman’, peeing off the top of a building into a Bucket.

Not long after, my Brother got the mighty ZX Spectrum and I’ll talk about that some other time, but I can remember, clear as day that our Stepdad at the time, set us a task to write a Program ourselves…we jumped at it, as it wasn’t that often you could do anything to impress the Man, so with my Brother all set on his new Spectrum and me on my Laser…we set to work one Saturday.

The biggest movie at the time was Tron. It was probably the first CGI movie and in the local Arcade, the Tron game was the most popular…Light Cycles, the Frisbee thing and if you’ve ever seen the film, it ends with the ‘Hero’ throwing one of these Frisbee things at the evil Computer and destroying for all time…mind you, the new Film is out soon, so I guess not…”End of Line”!

So, I decided that my Program was going to recreate this ending, with animation and sound…it was gonna’ be Ace! I can’t remember what my Brother wrote, but I spent ages and ages on this Program. One good thing about my Laser is that you could program each button to play a different Musical note...of course, it was just a beep, but you could specify the note and the length (If only I knew then, how much of an impact this would make to me in the future).

So here I am, been on it all day and it was finally finished…When I ran the Program an animated version of the evil Computer showed, with the theme tune to Tron playing over the top…all in different colours…it was great. The Stepdad decided to see what we had done and looked at my Brothers code…but can’t remember what he said, but then he looked at mine…I ran the Program and he seemed to like it, then asked me to ‘List’ the Program…He just laughed at it, but not in a good way “You’ve just used PRINT@ statements, not PEEK and POKE”…he was a ‘Better Boy’…anything you could do, he could do better.

I was left there sitting in the corner of the living room, looking at my Program list and felt humiliated, small and cried for the rest of the day…I was proud of what I had done, I’d done it all on my own, with no help, but it was no good. In a way, this moment kind of put me off Computers or should I say the Programming side and it wasn’t until much later when I got into Music Production when I was 17/18, that my interest started again.

Anyway, shortly after having the Laser, the company went ‘Bust’ and you couldn’t buy any games or anything, but that didn’t matter, the game market exploded with the release of the ZX Spectrum that my Brother had and this will be the topic of my next post…The ZX Spectrum…Gaming had arrived!