22 Nov
2007
22 Nov
'07
3:15 p.m.
On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 22:47 +0000, Andrew Burton wrote:
... I decided to ditch programming and concentrate on
playing games.
A chap I know who made his money from programming computer games once
said that he reckoned that the reason Dundee was the games programming
capital of Europe was that's where the ZX Spectrums were built.
Everyone in Dundee during the 1980s had a Spectrum - someone always
"knew a guy in the pub" who sold them very cheaply.
The practical upshot of this was that anyone who had any programming
talent had a computer to develop on, with good documentation and a
massive userbase.
Incidentally, the first computer game I ever played was the lemonade
stand game, on Chris van der Kuyl's Dad's Apple II. I remember thinking
how cool it looked, great bit of design. My eight-year-old self was
particularly impressed with the coloured ribbon cables ;-)
Gordon