“Digital Retro : The Evolution Of The Personal Computer”

If you're in your mid-thirties and work in the IT industry you probably grew up using home computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore-64, Acorn Atom and Atari 800. If this sounds like you, you'll probably be interested in a new book that I got hold of recently entitled "Digital Retro" by Gordon Laing. The author writes the monthly "Retro" article in Personal Computer World and it's a coffee-table style book that looks at 44 classic computers from the 70's and 80's.

Each computer has a two or four-page spread that gives the specification for each machine, a number of glossy photos and a bit of history around the company and the computer itself. In the past, I've owned an Atari 400, Vic-20, BBC Model B, Commodore Amiga, Mattel Intellivision, Oric-1 and a Commodore-64 (most of which are still in boxes in the loft) but it's the articles about some of the lesser known models, such as the Amstrad CPC-64, Tatung Einstein, Texas TI99/4a, Mattel Aquarius, Jupiter ACE and the Sinclair QL that make the book particularly interesting.

A couple of interesting snippets from the book : Linus Torvalds originally learnt to program on the Sinclair QL, who learnt to program in assembler using the QL's Motorola 6800 processor; The Jupiter ACE was a ZX81 lookalike designed and built by several of the original Sinclair team, but used FORTH instead of BASIC as it's programming language; and the RISC chipset originally designed for the Acorn Archimedes is the direct descendent of the StrongARM chips used in most of today's mobile phones and PDAs.

What made these old machines interesting is that backward compatibility was never really an issue, and each company was free to innovate and add features however it liked, leading to a situation where, over a period of five years from 1980 to 1985, the amount of innovation within the home PC market was phenomenal and with most machines costing less that 400. Take for example Sinclair, which in 1980 launched the ZX80, the first sub- 100 computer in the UK, followed by the ZX81 one year later, the colour ZX Spectrum a year later on, and the Sinclair QL later in 1984. Within four years, you'd gone from a barely functional Z80-based black and white computer with 1K of RAM and no floating point calculations,, to a 16-bit home/office computer using the same processor family as the Mac, it's own office productivity suite, and the famous Microdrive tape drives. Although it's great now that you can buy any PC and it'll run any PC software, somewhere along the line the innovation's gone and a PC now isn't all that different to the original PC built back in 1981.

The book's by no means a comprehensive history, but it's an interesting diversion down memory lane for anyone who still fondly looks back at loading programs using a cassette player and typing in program listings in Computer & Video Games. On the same subject, if you're interested in the story behind the Acorn Atom, BBC Micro and the "Elite" game, I'd also recommend Francis Spufford's "Backroom Boys - The Secret Return Of The British Boffin", which covers this story off as well as the the backroom boys behind Concorde, Vodafone, Beagle 2 and the Black Night rocket launcher.