I remember my first computer. It was the first computer I’d ever seen in real life and not on Tomorrow’s World (Thursday evening, 7.30, BBC1 – how we looked forward to it!)
I was about eight years old and it was a big, off-white, bulky contraption of metal with a curved glass television screen, a typewriter keyboard and a tape player all built in. Across the front in big silver letters was written PET. It was magic. The future had arrived, just like they said it would on Tomorrow’s World – and here it was, in my very own house.
At first we didn’t know what to do with it. We discovered how to switch it on and were thrilled as it hummed into life. We sat in eager anticipation as the cathode-ray-tube warmed up, then in some bemusement as we watched a small green line blinking on and off in the top left corner of the screen.
Before very long we learned that we could tell it to do certain simple tasks and it would do them. I soon learned its language and wrote long and logical instructions to make it perform more complicated tricks, such as writing poetry (that almost made sense), playing guessing games, doing difficult sums very quickly. It could count up to a thousand in about three seconds and was very good at sums. It always gave the right answer, except when I succeeded in confusing or confounding it with impossible equations involving fractions or multiples of infinity
In a way, it was just like having an actual pet – except that it didn’t actually move. It wasn’t actually alive, but still it became part of the family, a part of our lives. From then on it was always there – always ready to play games, perform new or old tricks, do difficult sums very quickly…
I can’t remember when the PET died or what happened to it in the end. Perhaps it’s still in the attic of my parents’ house, gathering dust with the old tape players, record players, cine-cameras and projectors and piles of other outdated technology from bygone days. At some point – I can’t remember when – it was replaced with a new computer. Something similar, but more modern looking, more powerful – perhaps even 64K, which was about eight times more K’s than the PET had had. You could get it to count to a million before you could p-p-p-pick up a Penguin (That’s an obscure reference to 1970’s British advertising campaign for a chocolate bar, in case you’re wondering. Funny how these things stick in your mind, even decades after you’ve forgotten everything you ever learned in school).
I don’t remember shedding any tears for the passing of my first PET, but now, when I look back on those days – when that was the first and only computer on our street – before the internet, before youtube, facebook and google – before smartphones and GPS, voice and face recognition software built in – I do miss it and sometimes wonder at what it has grown to become.
This story first appeared as part of my 'No Internet Diary' series. I wrote it myself.
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