After hours Toolkit

Digital Retro review

9.0

Editors' Rating

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 28 Oct 2004

As eBay expensively demonstrates, binary nostalgia is alive and well. We were computer buffs back in the 1980s, before anyone had heard of geeks, nerds and anoraks: slightly scary people who spent altogether too much time hunched over plastic boxes that didn't do very much. But they were exciting times of massive change and tremendous potential, and their repercussions are still being felt.

Now, technology journalist and collector Gordon Laing has documented those days in Digital Retro, a coffee table book that brings together virtually every significant home computer on the UK scene between 1975 and 1989. Forty systems are lovingly documented, each getting four pages of luscious colour photography and well-researched text. Laing, a true enthusiast, spent much time tracking down the people who made the industry happen. For a young scene it has already created a great deal of folklore, so Laing has done a good service by going back to the primary sources -- and there are new nuggets of trivia aplenty, even for those who pride themselves on an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject. Linus Torvalds' first computer is in there -- and it's probably not what you might think.

The true joy of the book is in the memories it stirs -- the fun of the religious wars between Speccy and Beeb, ST and Amiga, the endless arguments about processors, disk drives and tape loading errors. In a rare error of taste, Laing chose his own Commodore 64 for the cover shot instead of the far superior, more wholesome ZX Spectrum. Doesn't the man know that the Z80 architecture ran rings around the 6502 variant in the Crummydore? But that's forgivable, as is the inclusion of a handful of consoles. Remember how much you wanted a Vectrex?

Digital Retro: The Evolution and Design of the Personal Computer is a stunningly addictive book for anyone who ever lusted after the eccentric, engaging and short-lived systems that graced the pages of computer magazines in the 1980s. For the second edition, I'd love to see more circuit boards and screen shots of the beasts in action -- the souls of the old machines deserve celebration, and there's something of the mausoleum in the endless shots of dead screens and unlit LEDs. And everyone will have their favourite computers that haven't made it into the first edition: the Enterprise Elan with its carrot-in-a-cowpat joystick, the Science of Cambridge MK-14 and the Research Machines 380Z all have strong claims for inclusion. Then there are the iconic peripherals -- the Epson dot-matrix printers, the WS2000 modem, the Kempston joysticks. That next edition will have to be a lot bigger, and should also fix the rare misfires -- a late model Apple monitor with an early Apple II system unit, for example.

Nonetheless, this is an exceptionally attractive document of the times that set so many of us up for a lifetime in tech. Laing is to be congratulated on his labour of love, which has already earned its place in my personal collection of microprocessing memorabilia.