Christmas presents that changed your life for good
Every Christmas I think about which gift I’ve received changed my life. I can say for sure that it was the present that landed under the tree in the year of our Lord 1991. It was an amazing, unimaginable feeling, at eleven years old, to unwrap my first personal microcomputer, a Didaktik M (a Czechoslovak ZX Spectrum clone).
Inside this powerhouse ticked a 4 MHz Z80A processor, with a staggering 64 KB of memory at its disposal. The TV served as a monitor back then, and we used ordinary cassette tapes in place of a disk. They usually held the family silver, wonderful games you could control with a joystick. Yes, using a joystick for most games was quite normal in those days.
One game I’ll never forget was Franta Fuka’s stunning text adventure Podraz III, in which I took on the role of computer hacker Tim Coleman. I still have no idea whether the number three was a nod to Lucas’s Star Wars, which also started with part three, or simply one of Fuka’s eccentricities. In any case, Podraz I and II were never made, or I never heard of them.
Among the Didaktik’s other quirks was its uninsulated little transformer. My friends and I could warm our tea on it while playing. The joysticks weren’t very good either, so I wrecked quite a few. The worst joystick killer was the decathlon game (Dacathlon), especially the 1,500-metre race, which required waggling the stick from side to side as fast as you could.
Playing games got me wondering how they were made. That led me to Basic, short for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, which was built right into the Didaktik. And that was how I first found my way into programming, the trade I’ve been getting by in for quite a few years now.
I’m almost certain that if I’d got something else that Christmas in ’91, a slot-car set, say, I wouldn’t be what I am today, a software developer. Every Christmas I remember the Didaktik and thank my parents for their foresight. If I had to name one other thing that influenced me, it would be Lego. Those days are long gone, though. For some time now I’ve been getting the obligatory socks and underwear.