Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  A story – recounted by Furber and whispered by others – about the ZX Spectrum’s cost-cutting went round the industry: ‘We became aware of the legend of the Sinclair blue spot return system,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if this is true, but the rumour was that if you sent back a Spectrum because it didn’t work, all they did was stick a blue spot on the bottom and send it out to another customer. And if it came back with a blue spot on, it got thrown in the bin.’

  But none of the machine’s shortcomings mattered. The ZX Spectrum was for sale in every WH Smith across the land and at a price that made sense. Moreover, it would soon develop its biggest selling point: the largest selection of games for any machine in the world, bar none.

  Meanwhile, as the BBC Micro became the home of educational software in Britain, inevitably some found that the medium came to reflect its message: safe programs that taught with the careful pace of a diligent school master and in the earnest primary colours of children’s books. The ZX Spectrum had a racier, even grungier, image – it was the people’s computer, where an educational package was a subterfuge for bringing a games machine into the home. It would shamelessly entertain, while the BBC Micro, with its backing from the national broadcaster and a natural place in schools and the homes of teachers, never shook off an aura of worthiness.

  The market became divided between the cost-conscious gamers, and those who wanted a computer to teach, or to learn, or who took comfort in the respectable endorsement of the BBC. Other machines grabbed tens of per cent of market share, but for half a decade nothing knocked these two off the pole position of their respective markets, even while they were jostling with each other. Or, as on one infamous occasion, when they came to blows.

  In the run up to Christmas 1984, Acorn ran a provocative advert that pointed out the high failure rate of the ZX Spectrum, and Clive Sinclair was infuriated. According to Michael Jeacock, a newspaper columnist who happened to be in the Baron of Beef pub in Cambridge at the time, the entrepreneur launched himself at Curry, allegedly shouting, ‘You fucking buggering shit-bucket!’ But in Curry’s version, told to technology journalist Ellie Seymour, the only real fight happened later, in the wine bar Shades across the road. ‘He came up behind me and put his hands round my face, his hand went in my eye and it made me see red. I spun round and swung him a light blow.’

  The fight formed the denouement of Micro Men, a 2009 BBC drama about Sinclair’s rivalry with Acorn. Curry was a consultant on the script, although he chose not to watch it. ‘Poor Clive was made to look like a lunatic,’ he says. ‘Which he isn’t.’ The altercation didn’t appear to damage the pair’s friendship though – weeks later Curry was a guest at Sinclair’s New Year’s party.

  Clive Sinclair was knighted for his ubiquitous computers. They owed their success to the games market, but like a rock star known for a single hit, Sinclair comes across as tired of being associated with this legacy. He rarely discusses the Spectrum now, and it seems that he never really forgave the BBC, or believed that its decision was fair. ‘The BBC had made up their minds before they spoke to us,’ he said in 1989. ‘I think that was one of the most outrageous steps in the whole home computer business. The BBC shouldn’t have given a contract to anybody, but if they did do it, it should have been an open bid, and it wasn’t. We said we could have made the machine that they wanted for half the price that Acorn did, and they just didn’t want to know. They were making a cut and that was that.’

  Perhaps if Sinclair had won the BBC contract, or even if he had never split with Curry at all, Britain would have emerged from the eighties with a single, strong computer brand with real survival power. But the masters the two men served were so different – the value conscious mass market and teaching programming in schools – that a rapprochement would have involved too great a sacrifice. As it is, the BBC intervened just at the point when the technology was coalescing around a viable consumer product, one resistant to obsolescence. In the process, the Corporation, Sinclair and Acorn established the landscape for UK computing for nearly a decade, and trained a generation of the most influential games creators in the world.

  3

  We Bought It to Help with Your Homework

  In January 1982, Paul Kriwaczek, the series producer of the BBC’s first programmes for teaching computing, was finding that his complicated job had become even harder because production delays on the BBC Micro meant that neither he nor his viewers had any computers. It was a difficult time for him and David Allen. The BBC had already been criticised for postponing The Computer Programme for a term, and even then the machine didn’t turn up until midway through the series. When it did, it arrived too close to recording to train the crew. Although the viewers saw presenter Chris Searle switch the Micro on for the first time, ‘There were probably people under the table making it work,’ says Allen.

  Even without the hardware, the programme was declared a success. With an audience of more than a million it was a landmark for an education programme, but its real achievement was to make computing feel accessible. Audiences were shown computers in use, on a desk in a homely set not very different from their office or school. Sometimes the viewer’s patience was tested: they watched while the presenters tediously typed out computer code, reading aloud as they did, but it made computers seem approachable. Imagining using one themselves didn’t seem such a stretch.

  It led to a follow-up series in 1983, Making the Most of the Micro. By this time, computers were trickling and then pouring into shops and homes, and the series was even more successful. A fifth of the British population watched an episode at some point, and two thirds of computer owners did. It quickly became a flagship of the broadcaster’s educational programming.

  The show’s presenters became household names. Chris Searle and Fred Harris were loved for their sense of curiosity which bordered on boffinish, and Leslie Judd was already well known from Blue Peter. Ian McNaught-Davis, a Yorkshireman and mountaineer, displayed a love of the technology and a faint air of disapproval about gaming. Allen also brought John Coll in front of the camera to round off the team.

  In October 1983, the BBC decided to devote an entire Sunday morning to a live edition of the programme, called Making the Most of the Micro – Live. It had been widely advertised, and promised demonstrations that would show off the potential of computers in real time, including one that would reveal how computers could connect to each other over the phone. Kenneth Baker, the government’s computing champion, agreed to appear.

  There are various stories about what happened next – some suggest that the BBC harboured spies on its production staff, others that the BBC had simply made itself too big a target. But whatever the cause, the result was extraordinary: viewers saw Ian McNaught-Davis hacked, live on British television.

  Producer David Allen watched events unfold from the gallery. ‘I got real stick for that,’ he admits. ‘I didn’t know that was going to happen!’ The sense of panic in the production team grew as there was a realisation that they might be losing control of a live broadcast. ‘You’re sitting there with the programme running, you have to make decisions – do you cut this or do you let it run?’ Allen says. ‘I was desperately looking at the stuff that was coming up on the screen when the hackers broke in to see if there was anything obscene!’

  As it happened, the hacker’s prank was harmless. A poem appeared on Coll and McNaught-Davis’ computer, and then disappeared, along with the perpetrator. David Allen never did learn who the hacker was, or how he pulled off his stunt. ‘We don’t know how they managed to get the password,’ he says. ‘I was taken completely by surprise.’

  In a sense, it was a victory for the agenda of the BBC’s Computer Literacy Programme. In less than four years, computing had moved from being seen as a job-stealing bogeyman to becoming so democratised that the public were now taking over.

  But it also showed something else. Throughout the BBC’s planning, computing had been regarded as a product of engineering, of high thinking
and the noble ambition of educators – all the programmes, subsidies and endorsements betrayed a benign paternalism. But in parallel, Britain had seen the growth of a punkier ‘hacker’ culture of programmers and developers who could pull off jaw-dropping tricks, and wanted to show them off. These coders had been allowed to thrive in the BBC’s new world of home computing, but didn’t need anybody’s permission. And although that morning they were writing electronic graffiti, their main public face would be as games writers.

  At first sight, the widespread adoption of the home computer by the British in the early eighties is rather mysterious. The computers were expensive – costing a typical fortnight’s wages – at a time when Britain was barely pulling out of recession.

  Consequently they were marketed at the spending classes, with regular adverts in broadsheet newspaper supplements, but these give barely a hint as to why home computers became so popular. They arrived without any particular function other than their pack-in software, and making them perform the simplest tasks demanded time, dedication and a logical frame of mind. Even as their popularity grew, no one was sure what they were for.

  The manufacturers didn’t seem to know either. In their advertising, most followed the same form: a two-page spread, a pithy headline, a smart picture, and columns of boastful but friendly prose, easing the reader into the idea that the computer revolution was on their doorstep. Games were briefly mentioned, but only as part of a smorgasbord of potential capabilities, plenty of which were still on the drawing boards of the makers. The adverts quickly became similar – unless readers carefully tracked the memory and numbers of colours, or cared what an RS423 port was, they might agree that computers were A Good Thing, but would struggle to remember which to buy.

  Some adverts were more practical: the computer against a wonder-wall of screenshots, with games muddled in amongst worthier projects. One for the ZX81 featured bill statements, address books and diaries, each screen showing off the computer’s stretched memory. But even these were a puffed-up bubble waiting to be burst – where the blurb promised, the reality disappointed. The vaunted time savers proved anything but: it was barely worth the effort to load a list of contacts, and a living-room-locked computer is an outright hindrance for storing recipes. In 1984, long after these shortcomings should have been apparent, a Channel 4 infodrama called Anything We Can Do still featured a technological novice being browbeaten into accepting the usefulness of computers. Confronted with a list of functions – household accounts and so on – he protested that using a pad or a calculator would be easier, and it was hard to argue with him.

  Yet these new computers often sold out through pre-orders well ahead of their launch dates. There was an excitement about the products – they seemed like a piece of the future, and as awareness mounted some buyers found that £400 wasn’t too much to pay to open the door to a brave new world. But there was also an early market which didn’t need to be sold a clear purpose because it already had one: programming. Some of the buyers of the BBC Micro and the Sinclair machines had been experimenting with American computers for years, and they were often proficient coders. This kind of user recognised the power of the newer machines, and would test them to limits that even their creators hadn’t anticipated.

  Take Jez San, for instance. In 1978, sometime before his thirteenth birthday, San’s parents bought him his first computer, a TRS-80. In his north London bedroom, he learnt to program, at first in BASIC – ‘it had a brilliant BASIC,’ he recalls – and then in machine code. An early Z80-based home computer, the TRS-80 was primitive, but for San it was a playground where even limitations were creative challenges. His dot matrix printer was freed from blocky text and allowed to sing with intricate graphics, and he tricked the computer into using the joystick from an Atari console to play keyboard-controlled games. He didn’t get paid, but the listings of his code – especially the joystick hack – became essential typing in the user community. At the very start of his teens, San was already a name amongst hackers.

  So he was more than ready for the BBC Micro when it arrived, and it was certainly ready for him. BBC Micros came in two varieties – the base Model A, and the expanded Model B, with more memory and features. San’s first ever job, at the back of a shop in north London, saw him hunched over a hot soldering iron, beefing up the punier versions so that they could punch like their bigger brothers. ‘If you can imagine a sweat shop, that’s exactly what it was,’ he says.

  It was only San’s hobby that saved him from a miserable summer. With this hands-on introduction to the machine, he pursued his passion and set about writing computer games. Some, like Skylon Attack, used a clever piece of software he devised – a Programmers Development System – which would eventually become a crutch to lots of UK developers. But none of Jez San’s 8-bit games saw daylight.

  His first fortune came from elsewhere. ‘Before the internet, we used modems to communicate, and we used various legal and illegal networks to access remote computers,’ he says. The British Telecom network used PSS – Packet Switching System – which San and his circle of friends could hack into. He became a skilled network hacker, perhaps one of the best in the country, and he used this knowledge to create the nation’s first mass-market modem.

  Called the ‘Unicom’, it was built to a spec that San designed, to match software that would sit in a chip the user would fit in their BBC Micro. Reviews agreed that it featured ‘all sorts of cool stuff’ and at under £50, was ‘unbelievably cheap’, but it also had a well-known character flaw. Computer use on the BT network was still a novelty, and any equipment connected to it had to be passed by the British Approvals Board of Telecommunications. Its seal of approval was a sticker with a green circle on it, and most modems wore it proudly, as the law said they – and their advertising – had to. But Unicom was given a dunce’s cap: a bright red triangle. Although it wasn’t illegal to sell the Unicom, this mark shouted unmistakeably that it wasn’t legal to use it, and those who did were warned that ‘action could be taken’. Other manufacturers might have adjusted or withdrawn their product, but the Unicom modem hardened its rebellious line with a new brand name: Demon. The logo featured a devilish figure with horns and a trident and, intriguingly, an inverted triangle for a body. In the black-and-white adverts, a Demon stood either side of the BABT’s triangular logo, and it would have taken a sharp eye to notice that the warning was more than just part of a pattern.

  Whether buyers didn’t notice or didn’t care, sales poured in. Demon became the BBC Micro’s bestselling modem, and the teenage Jez San pocketed more than £30,000 for it, which ‘for a young man was a lot’. But a fortune had only been half of his success. He had filled the modem’s software with tricks, and with a hacker’s instincts had embedded secret ways to take control of a computer using his modem, to make it play sounds, or type words to the screen. That chip, which thousands of buyers had trustingly placed in their BBC Micros, had given him a backdoor into their computers.

  Mainly, he used it to cheat at playing games. San reached the top rank of ‘wizard’ in MUD, and other players found that he had reality-warping powers. ‘I cheated to annoy people and confound them,’ he admits. ‘I would force other people to type commands into MUD, which could be used to make them say things that they didn’t want to say, or kill people that they didn’t want to kill. Or give me treasure.’

  It was harmless enough, like ‘climbing Everest’ to prove that it could be done. And only a couple of years before the Demon launch, when the biggest and best publicised target ever arose – a live, televised broadcast of a BBC Micro using the BT network – San took it as an honourable challenge. Although Allen knew nothing about it, some of the technical staff at the BBC did. ‘It was kind of with their knowledge,’ San says. ‘They knew I was going to hack, they were quite hoping I would. But they didn’t give me the password or anything.’

  He had copied the poem – an anthem to hacking – from Newsweek magazine and it was a dangerous thrill to deliver it
to such a high-profile address. At the time though, San swallowed his ego and remained silent about his feat. Indeed, he was pleased that some co-conspirators took the blame: ‘The great thing was some other friends of mine who were in the BBC [Micro] community, Oliver and Guy, whose nicknames were Oz and Yug, they messaged the BBC’s mailbox at the same time as my hack appeared live on air. So they got the credit for my hack. And I was very happy with that.’ But after years of quiet anonymity, he’s putting his first triumph on the record: ‘One of the most famous hacks in the UK was mine.’

  San may have been simultaneously one of the most visible and one of the most secretive of the generation of children, mainly boys, growing to maturity behind the keyboards of BBC Micros and ZX Spectrums. He was far from the only one, though.

  In spite of its victory in the battle for the BBC licence, Acorn never dominated the market for home computers. A key comparison between machines, one that even a novice buyer could understand, was the memory the hardware packed, and with 32KB compared to the ZX Spectrum’s 48KB, the BBC Micro was already outclassed. Moreover, the heavily engineered specifications trapped the price at the top end of the market, for the sake of expensive interfaces that no home user was likely to need. Any new entrant into the market could, and did, beat its memory spec while undercutting it in price.