The Joystick Port

A look back at the golden age of home computing, where new computer systems were announced and shelved with record speed. The birth of the bedroom coder, quietly working away on an idea that they alone had, staying up all night coding in strange languages, creating their own graphics, and orchestrating the sounds that would echo across the land.  These were the days when 1k was enough for a fun game, and 32k could hold an entire universe.

From the 70s,  throughout the 80s, and into the 90s, you could walk into a store and pick up a Spectrum, Dragon, Electron, a PET, an Adam, Enterprise, Apricot, or hundreds of other computers, nearly all completely incompatible with each other!  This was the wild west... a new frontier opening up, and we were going to conquer it.

We formed into tribes... The Speccy owners, the C64 crew, the unfortunate Amstrad kids, and the posh BBC Micro owners.  Later, we'd migrate, and the Amiga fans would set up a bridgehead against the Atari ST followers...