John Topley's Weblog

Digital Retro by Gordon Laing

Saturday, 16 April 2005

Hands up who remembers their first computer? I do, it was a 16K ZX Spectrum that my Dad bought directly from Sinclair Research in 1982. I was fortunate enough to be at the right age in the early 1980s, during the middle of the home computing boom. All my friends had Spectrums or ZX81s and some even had more serious looking computers such as Commodore 64s. It was an exciting time to be growing up, during an era when—certainly to the eight year old me—it felt like we were on the cusp of the future.

Digital Retro is a lavishly produced, large format book that is simply stuffed full of pictures of old and obsolete computers. It covers 44 machines over 192 pages, from the MITS Altair 8800 of 1975, through to 1988's exclusive NeXTCube. For anyone who was interested in such things at the time, this book is a real nostalgia trip. In addition to the well-chosen pictures, there are also a brief accompanying narratives that give the company history and tell you what happened next, plus some interesting trivia nuggets.

The sturdy BBC Model B microcomputer that was the staple of computer science lessons in British secondary education in the 1980s is here, as well as the obscure machine that used to sit unloved in the corner of the computing classroom at my school. It turns out it was a Sharp MZ-80K. We used to play Elite before the lessons started (and sometimes during, I have to admit!) until the teacher used to flip the master power switch off. The sudden repeated removal of electricity didn't seem to have an adverse effect on the BBC Model Bs. Computers were built to last in those days.

All the Sinclair machines are featured and my beloved ZX Spectrum is pictured with the full range of official accessories, including the ill-fated Microdrive tape storage device. I vaguely remember eagerly awaiting for the constantly delayed Microdrive to be launched, because I was so fed up with the unreliability of using a cassette player as a data storage device! It seemed that the quality of a game was in direct inverse proportion to the chances of loading it successfully.

The book includes all the seminal machines on the incredible computing journey that led us to where we are today. I mentioned the Altair but there's also the Apple II, the original IBM PC and the 1984 Apple Macintosh—none of which have ever been part of my life! These computers are all well-documented and it's much more interesting to see and read about the obscura, like 1983's Oric-1. I remember seeing an Oric-1 in the stationery store WH Smith's and thinking that it was really cool because you could get it to play four realistic sound effects, a phenomenon actually documented in Digital Retro.

Apparently some of the machines pictured in the book aren't original, but I'm not enough of an expert to have noticed this. Others have criticised it for being short on text, but I think that misses the point, which is that Digital Retro is a coffee table book that's made to be dipped into. If anything, I would have liked to have seen more pictures, in particular some screenshots would have been good. In spite of this, Digital Retro is a lovingly-put together book that will jog more than a few memories if you were into computers during the era it documents. 4/5.

top | index | previous | no next | comments ()