An Alternative History of Computing

October 17, 2025 / Richard Asquith / Blog, Snapshot

An Alternative History of Computing – Part One

Editors Note: All images created using Sora AI by OpenAI and are based on how the writer remembers them.

After a recent #GreggsWalk we sat around the diner at work discussing various things - wide ranging topics such as BBC Sounds podcasts, football, the features and benefits of Microsoft Fabric, a certain Circylists choice of dubious looking salad for lunch and randomly the conversation turned to our first computers. A few colleagues and I spent a leisurely half hour nerding out over the various different computing dinosaurs that drew us into technology in those early days. This led to a joke about what AI would make of the machines we grew up on... and that got me thinking. As most of us are children of the 80s and 90s, our reference points were largely similar. Many of the clients and partners that we collaborate with on a daily basis had similar journeys into technology and someone suggested “you should write a blog about it.”

So here we are. This is an alternative guide to the history of computing, seen through the eyes of a child who lived it and how those clunky old machines, revolutionary at the time, shaped the technologists we became.

First Contact Protocol

One of my earliest memories of computing came in hospital. I was there for an operation as a child and in the ward they had an Atari with Pong permanently plugged in. To me, it looked like the most exciting thing in the world. The problem was, I wasn’t allowed out of bed to play it. I watched other children take their turns, desperate to have a go. When I was finally allowed, it was on the day I was discharged. I had about ten minutes before my parents arrived to take me home - hardly the introduction I had hoped for.

That moment lit a spark, though. I wanted a computer of my own.

Growing up in Sheffield in the late 70s and early 80s, the son of a steelworker and a florist, computers weren’t exactly part of our household. Neither of my parents had ever used one. But one Christmas, my dad appeared with a big, hastily wrapped box. Inside was my very first computer: an Oric-1.

“It’s British made, it’ll be better than any of the others,” I was told. In reality, it wasn’t. At all. But it had been bought with love and with the best of intentions, so I stuck with it. There was only one magazine for the Oric-1 and very few games. The one I remember most vividly was Virus. It dominated that month’s issue - in fact, if memory serves, it was the entire issue. Typing it in took days. We didn’t know you could attach a tape drive to save the code you’d typed in, so every time we wanted to try and play a game the cycle went like this: input the code, run it, hope it worked and if it didn’t, debug it line by line with no real idea what you were doing. If the power went off or the machine was reset, you lost everything and had to start from scratch.

It was persistence bordering on purgatory.

Meanwhile, all my friends had Spectrums. The ZX81 had already done the rounds and they were moving on to the 48K and even the 128K with its built-in sound and tape drive. While they were loading up Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy from tape, I was still stuck typing code from a magazine.

That all changed when I found out a school friend was selling his ZX Spectrum 48K because he was getting the new 128K for Christmas. For £25, I became the proud owner of a machine with colour graphics, sound, a tape drive and - crucially - an actual library of games. It was like stepping into another world.

That Spectrum rocked my world. I wasn’t bothered that it was second hand, I wasn’t bothered that it caterwauled at me every time I switched it on. I didn’t care that it took somewhere between five and ten minutes to load a game (felt like hours at my age then!). All I was bothered about was that I had Renegade (!!!), Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy and 1942, a WWII fighter pilot game that made me feel like I was part of history. It even had a joystick! I had arrived. I had landed in the world of computing (we didn’t call it gaming, it was just all “computers” back then). For the next 18 months or so I still bought my magazines, but gradually the printed code within was replaced with demo tapes. Free games! Only ever one or two levels, but enough to whet the appetite.

Wireframe Frontiers

Around the same time, as a family we used to travel to my Uncle Chris’ on various celebratory weekends of the year - bonfire night, birthdays, that sort of thing. Uncle Chris was a lecturer in Computer Science at a university. Uncle Chris had a BBC Micro. With a 5.25” disk drive. My head fell off the first time I saw it! The games rarely got used, but when they did, my world was complete.

When we stopped over, there were usually more than one family staying and people were put up in rooms all over the house. It was a big old house (very old in fact) and the coldest room by far was the Computer Room. So narrow that only one person could sleep in there, no-one wanted to stop in that room as it was boring on your own and freezing. I didn’t care - I had the room to myself and access to the game that literally changed my life. Elite.

It melted my brain. Those wireframe graphics might look crude now, but at the time they felt like the most advanced thing I had ever seen. It wasn’t just a game - it felt like you were actually there. There was no “final boss” or neat ending, but instead a vast galaxy to explore - in fact, seven or eight galaxies if you pushed far enough. Each was filled with countless trading and combat options and the fact you could save your progress was mind-blowing.

For a few fleeting hours I was a space pilot, flying about the galaxy, trading for cash to upgrade my ship, dodging pirates, trying not to fall foul of the law and desperately lining up against a rotating hexagonal docking station that could end your game before you’d even started.

Elite didn’t have realistic Newtonian physics, the hardware wasn’t capable of that, but it simulated inertia and momentum well enough to feel real. More importantly, it fired my imagination. There was even a back-story novella, The Dark Wheel, that came packaged with the game and it still conjures pictures in my mind more than 35 years later. One of the opening sequences describes the protagonist entering a space station and being surrounded by all kinds of alien lifeforms - even now I can picture it clearly.

I was always a little devastated that The Dark Wheel[1] never became a full book series. It was my first introduction to the idea of a grand space opera - vast galaxies, complex characters, moral choices - and I would have read every volume if they had been written.

Magical times.

Silicon Terraces

Back home, the 48K was starting to lose its teeth. My mate Mark had got hold of the 128K with disk drive and introduced me to OutRun. Another worldview-altering moment. For a group of kids who loved go-karts (the wooden, pram-wheeled kind you pushed down a hill in Graves Park and just hung on for dear life), motor sport and Scalextric, it was like discovering your first truly addictive obsession.

Meanwhile, the Commodore 64 came and went without really registering in my world and early consoles were starting to land in friends’ houses - Duck Hunt and Mario accounted for many sleepless nights with the TV on mute. I must have been about 12 or 13 by this point.

Then suddenly, the Amiga blew everything away. Parallax scrolling[2] - that was all any Amiga owner talked about because it supposedly set it apart from its slightly less famous cousin, the Atari ST. Naturally, I had to be involved. I was determined, negotiating, bartering. After an extended summer of haggling with my parents, a deal was struck: I would forgo a Christmas present if I could have an Atari ST on my birthday a few months earlier. Think giving up two second-round picks for a first-rounder in the NFL draft for those who follow American sports.

Stuff parallax scrolling - I had Kick Off 2. As a football-obsessed kid, it was a revelation. Never before had I been able to play simulated football like that. Even better, there was an accompanying management simulator - Player Manager - that let you build a team, play the matches in a rudimentary version of Kick Off 2 and then export your squad onto a 3.5” disk.

That was the game-changer. You could take your team to a mate’s house, load it into Kick Off 2 and suddenly your management save was lining up in a full arcade match. My friend took it a step further: if two people exported their teams, they could face off head-to-head. Cue a league that spanned postcodes, friendship groups and even school years.

People would be coming and going all week to play their fixtures. Cups were hotly contested. There were three divisions, some filled with “computer” teams - the KO2 equivalent of Blackburn or Southampton - but every week threw up player vs player clashes that many of the gang turned up to watch. These were heady times. Sort of MMORPG, minus the O and before the internet. And yes, plenty of buses were caught.

There was even a newsletter, match reports and “photos” - really just artists’ impressions painstakingly drawn up in lessons that were supposed to be History, Geography or Economics. Shortly after, Sensible Soccer arrived and some of the players jumped ship, which caused the league to fall away. I don’t remember if we ever finished a full season, but for a few short months it was a thriving community of players and it consumed us all.

Looking back, it felt like a lifetime but in reality by then we were only a few short months from moving on to college life. Computer Science at Norton College beckoned, PCs were beginning to take over the computing landscape and everything was changing. My tired old Atari ST would soon be consigned to the loft, alongside the Spectrum and Oric-1 that had started this journey less than a decade earlier.

[1] The Dark Wheel was a short novella, written by English novelist Robert Holdstock, that helped to set out the backstory to the Elite Universe. It was the first example of a novella being included in the distribution of a computer game.

[2] Parallax scrolling was the practice of coding multiple background layers that moved across the screen at different speeds to create the impression of a 3D background.