I realised some while ago that I have the theme from Precinct 13 living deep in my subconscious, but it was only today, when Hip Hop On Precinct 13 came on the radio that I realised it was because the previous owner of the Commodore 64 I had as a kid was big into the demoscene and this was the theme track to one of them.

Not only did I have disk after disk full of demos but, amongst all the other disks for my 1541 drive, a copy of Elite and multiple save games which had either been hacked or which the previous owner had spent hundreds of hours building up. Docking was never so much fun as when it was a mere keypress away.

This was the computer, followed by the 286 which I wrote text adventure games on and modified Gorillas on, which got me into programming. I was never a hotshot PEEKer or POKEer, but even the basics, tediously copied in from a printed listing in a magazine, made me feel like a genius.

This August my son will turn five. He loves playing computer games, and with any luck, he’ll love the Kano he’ll be getting. Hopefully in thirty years he’ll be having flashbacks to images and sounds he spent hours exploring on the first computer he could call his own.