The parents of the home computer gamers of the 1980s presumably hoped we’d become programmers or accountants, but instead their kids ended up like me
I had one of those ads pop up on Twitter recently. You know the ones. Not the weirdly suggestive ones trying to get you to download some crap free-to-play mobile game. The ones that show you something you never previously thought you needed – because you didn’t – but now you’ve seen it, you think your life cannot possibly go on without it. Like a cage for barbecuing vegetables. A watch that doubles as a miniature air fryer. This one was for a tiny inkless printer you can use to print stuff from your phone and turn it into stickers.
People my age had this 42 years ago, though. Only back then it was the most derided peripheral ever: the Sinclair ZX Printer for the ZX Spectrum. My mother brought both machine and printer home in 1982, proclaiming that we would now be able to do word processing and write books like the families in the posh part of town. Before you scoff and say, “But Dominik, you grew up in Arbroath. There IS no posh part of Arbroath!”, let me stress that there IS. It is called Dundee.
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