Tweeting Like It’s 1982

The UK’s Vintage Computing Festival was held recently at The National Museum of Computing  (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park.

The Festival saw over 30 exhibitors show off a host of old-school computers, like the Sinclair ZX80, and a personal favourite of mine, the Commodore Amiga with vintage kit booted and live for adults to reminisce about the days of misspent youth, whilst their kids were able to learn the history of where today’s modern PC, smartphone and console technology originated.  

Despite Bletchley Park being a few miles up the road from me, I managed to miss the event, so I had to console myself with a great write-up of the event over at TechRadar. Whilst retro computing always tends to learn towards the nostalgic, it was very cool to see some of the models running newer applications, that we may not have expected them to.

My favourite? A Twitter client running on an old ZX Spectrum +3! Packed with a massive 128k, the +3 was the ZX Spectrum’s flagship model, lusted after by kids everywhere (as well as more than a few grown-ups I’m sure). If we have had Twitter back then, seriously, no homework would have got done. Ever.  Possibly even more bonkers than social networking for the Spectrum was a port of Guitar Hero for the Commodore 64.

The fact that developers are taking time out to code new software for obsolete computers is both laudable and borderline certifiable, but I love it all the same.  I’ll certainly be at next year’s festival, and there had better be Spectrum support for Windows Live Mesh available next time.