the first time I ever used a computer - introduction - delta s

I was born on a cold, cloudy day in 1982, in the small town of Salavat, in Bashkortostan, in the Southern Urals of the USSR. In 1989, when the time had come to go to school, I faced a problem: there were no places left for first-graders. I made a very upset face for my mother and ran with joy in my soul walked back home sadly… For a year, I had to stay home and have fun suffer without school…

My father studied electronics engineering and liked to solder something, like a ham radio hobbyist. At the beginning of the 1990s, he bought my first personal computer, which was called “Delta-S”, a clone of the ZX Spectrum with a whopping 48 KB of RAM, based on the Zilog Z80 CPU.

It was a squeaky black plastic box with a power unit so hot you could fry eggs on it if you put a pan on top. The computer connected directly to the TV on one side, and to the tape recorder on the other. At that time, only 4 computers were in my city, and I was one of the first cool dudes who had one! I felt like a god among mere mortals demigod. But… My cassette tape with games had been demagnetized. I didn’t even know where I could find the games. It was a tragedy for a 7-year-old boy.

I had just a book that came with the computer set: BASIC for ZX Spectrum (in Russian, of course), and I didn’t understand half the technical terms. My father bought me a technical dictionary, and I started reading it sentence by sentence. After a couple of days, my neighbor and I played a simple game: I drew a circle on the screen, and he shot a point inside. Then we switched. At that time, I learned what coordinates were and how I could use them.

After weeks, I had already written my own programs, and I was proud of them. I was a child, I wanted to play, and I started making my own games. Simple, ugly, primitive, but mine! After several months, my father found another person who owned the same computer. They made a copy of his cassette of games and brought it home. That was when I first saw real computer games! And I gave myself a challenge: make the same games myself. That decision is exactly where my story begins.