Glossary
My stories are full of rubber keys, loading screeches and bionic men. If you weren't a British kid in the 1980s, some of that needs explaining. Here's what these things were, and why they mattered so much to me and to everyone my age.
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A box that connected a computer to the internet over the phone line, announcing itself with a famous screech. 56 kilobits per second was the top speed, and you rarely got it.
Why it mattered
One photo could take minutes to download, and someone picking up the phone at 99% killed the whole thing. Every 90s teenager negotiated with their parents for exclusive use of the landline.
Read: The Cloud Has No Mercy
Alan Sugar's all-in-one word processor with a green screen and its own printer, sold for about the price of a typewriter. It used unusual 3-inch disks while the rest of the world went for 3.5-inch.
Why it mattered
It put a word processor in thousands of offices and spare bedrooms that would never have bought a “computer”. The odd disks became a running joke, and they still make collectors wince.
IBM's midrange business computer, the workhorse of warehouses, factories and banks. It still runs today under the name IBM i.
Why it mattered
It’s where my career in data really began, at twenty, in a warehouse with the plan upside down. The AS/400 knew where every part was meant to be. My job was knowing where they actually were.
Acorn's sturdy cream computer, built for the BBC's Computer Literacy Project. It was in nearly every British school.
Why it mattered
If you learned to program at school in the 80s, you probably did it on one of these. Elite was born on it. Acorn’s engineers later designed the ARM chip, which now runs almost every phone on the planet, so that classroom computer has a very long shadow.
Before disks, games came on audio cassettes. You pressed PLAY on a tape recorder and listened to five minutes of screeching while coloured stripes flickered round the screen.
Why it mattered
Loading a game was an act of faith. Anyone walking past, a slightly wrong volume setting or simply existing too near the tape could produce the dreaded “R Tape loading error” at 99%, and you started again. It taught a generation patience, or at least taught us to stare at stripes.
Read: ZX Spectrum in SQL & Daley Thompson’s Decathlon · Running Elite in SQL Server · The Cloud Has No Mercy
A budget Commodore machine with 16K of memory, meant as a cheaper little brother to the Commodore 64. It couldn't run C64 games, and it ended up sold off cheaply in Britain.
Why it mattered
This was my computer. While my friends were flying round the galaxy in Elite, I was learning that my machine couldn’t load their tapes and that BASIC came in different dialects. Its manual later had a second career propping up an overheating laptop.
Commodore's 64K home computer, famous for its SID sound chip. It's still listed as the best-selling single computer model of all time.
Why it mattered
In the playground there were two tribes: Spectrum owners and C64 owners, and each was sure the other had bought the wrong machine. The C64’s music was undeniably better. Spectrum owners rarely admitted this.
Read: ZX Spectrum in SQL & Daley Thompson’s Decathlon · Boing, Boing, Boing
A home computer with custom graphics and sound chips that could do things PCs of the day could only dream of. The Amiga 500 of 1987 was the one most people owned.
Why it mattered
The Amiga made computers feel creative. It drew, it sang, it multitasked, and for a while it was simply the coolest machine you could own. Its bouncing ball demo is one of computing’s great legends.
Read: Boing, Boing, Boing · Can a Database Rave? Making SQL Server Play Music
One of the first big online services, offering email, forums and files to dial-up subscribers before the web took off.
Why it mattered
For many people this was the internet before the internet: a walled garden you dialled into, paying by the minute.
Read: The Cloud Has No Mercy
International Computers Limited, Britain's own computer giant, which built mainframes for government and big business. Fujitsu later took it over.
Why it mattered
It’s where I did my school work experience in London, the only pupil from my school sent there, without really knowing what the company did. There was no internet to look it up.
Pages of program code printed in computer magazines for readers to type in by hand, line by line.
Why it mattered
This is how many of us learned to program, mostly by learning to find our own typing mistakes. One wrong character on page four meant the game wouldn’t run, and you had no idea where to look. I was convinced I needed to become a fast typist.
Zilog's 8-bit processor, the brain inside the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC and countless other machines.
Why it mattered
Its instruction set is what you learn when you want to emulate a Spectrum. To run Daley Thompson in SQL Server I had to teach a database to pretend to be one, one instruction at a time.
Read: ZX Spectrum in SQL & Daley Thompson’s Decathlon · Boing, Boing, Boing
Sinclair's answer to the floppy disk: tiny cartridges holding a loop of tape, about 85K each, plugged into the Spectrum through an add-on called Interface 1.
Why it mattered
They were rare, fiddly and much faster than cassettes, and they didn’t carry the copy protection that tapes did. That’s exactly why my Daley Thompson’s Decathlon in SQL Server loads from one.
Sir Clive Sinclair's little black computer with rubber keys and a rainbow stripe across one corner. It cost £125 for the 16K model and £175 for the 48K, plugged into the family telly and loaded its games from cassette tapes.
Why it mattered
For a generation of British kids this was the first computer in the house, and the reason so many of us ended up working with them. It had eight colours, one beeping speaker and a memory smaller than this paragraph’s web page, and it still felt like the future. I eventually built one inside SQL Server, so it’s fair to say it never quite left me.
Read: ZX Spectrum in SQL & Daley Thompson’s Decathlon · Boing, Boing, Boing
A red and white chequered ball bouncing across a grid, written by RJ Mical and Dale Luck for the Amiga prototype at the Winter CES show in January 1984.
Why it mattered
It ran so smoothly that visitors went looking under the stand for the hidden computer doing the real work. It’s still shorthand for the moment people realised home computers could do proper animation. I made it bounce inside SQL Server, which turned out to be harder than Doom.
Read: Boing, Boing, Boing
Ocean Software's athletics game, starring the British double Olympic decathlon champion. You made him run by waggling the joystick left and right as fast as humanly possible.
Why it mattered
It broke more joysticks than any other game, and plenty of wrists too. Every school had someone who swore by the ruler technique. I didn’t have a joystick, which is perhaps why I had to build the whole Spectrum in SQL Server to finally play it properly.
Read: ZX Spectrum in SQL & Daley Thompson’s Decathlon · Boing, Boing, Boing
id Software's first-person shooter, released as shareware in December 1993. Its engine, written mostly by John Carmack, ran fast 3D on an ordinary 486 PC.
Why it mattered
Doom is why offices suddenly discovered their networks could carry multiplayer games at lunchtime. It changed what PCs were for. Its level files turned out to be a neat relational schema, which is how it ended up running inside SQL Server.
Read: Running Doom Inside SQL Server · Running Elite in SQL Server
A space trading game by two Cambridge students, Ian Bell and David Braben, first published on the BBC Micro. It held eight galaxies of 256 planets each, all generated from a few numbers, in a machine with 32K of memory.
Why it mattered
Nobody had seen anything like it: an open universe in wireframe 3D where you could trade, fight or turn pirate. It’s one of the most influential games ever made. My friends Gordon and Gareth lived in it while my Commodore 16 sulked. Underneath, as I found out forty years later, it’s a database wearing a spaceship costume.
A British publisher that sold games for £1.99 when most cost £7 or more, in newsagents and petrol stations as well as computer shops.
Why it mattered
Pocket money could buy a Mastertronic game. When the big releases wouldn’t load on my Commodore 16, Mastertronic was what I was playing.
Games Workshop's tabletop war game, played with painted miniature armies on a table covered in model scenery.
Why it mattered
Hours of painting tiny figures, followed by an argument about the rules. It was the other great obsession of my friends Gordon and Gareth, and it was the cause of at least one friendship-testing incident.
The British decathlete who won Olympic gold in Moscow in 1980 and again in Los Angeles in 1984.
Why it mattered
A genuine national hero with a big grin and a bigger personality, and one of the first sportsmen to put his name on a computer game. For kids in the 80s he was the person we were pretending to be while destroying our joysticks.
The programmer behind the engines of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, and co-founder of id Software.
Why it mattered
He showed the world how real-time 3D could work on ordinary hardware, then explained it openly, which taught a generation of programmers. When I played Doom I couldn’t imagine the brains behind it. Then Carmack told us it was all down to triangles.
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist who described quantum mechanics as a "sum over histories", adding up every path a particle could take. He also played the bongos and explained the Challenger disaster with a glass of iced water.
Why it mattered
Feynman made physics sound like fun, and his books and lectures made scientists of a lot of people. His idea of summing every possible path turns out to be a very good way to build a spelling corrector in SQL.
Read: Sum Over Every Path · Feynman’s Postulates and Relational Text Analytics in T-SQL
Founder of Amstrad, which sold cheap hi-fis, computers and word processors. Amstrad bought Sinclair's computer business in 1986.
Why it mattered
Before “You’re fired” on The Apprentice, he was the man who made technology affordable and wasn’t fussy about where the parts came from. The 3-inch disks in the PCW had to come from somewhere.
The inventor and entrepreneur behind the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, knighted in 1983. He was also responsible for the C5 electric tricycle.
Why it mattered
He made computers cheap enough for ordinary families, which is arguably why Britain has so many programmers of a certain age. The C5 was less of a hit, but it was decades ahead of the e-scooter.
The comedy where Chevy Chase drives his family across America to an amusement park in the Wagon Queen Family Truckster, a hideous pea-green estate car. In the desert the Truckster flies off the road at a Road Closed sign.
Why it mattered
It’s the road trip film for anyone who grew up in the 80s, and the Truckster is one of cinema’s great ugly cars. I’ve spent far too long rebuilding that jump in Blender and Unreal.
Read: My Potato Mountain & The 46th Greatest Comedy Film Of All Time
An American TV series starring Lee Majors as astronaut Steve Austin, rebuilt with bionic parts after a crash. "We can rebuild him. We have the technology."
Why it mattered
Every child in the playground ran in slow motion making the bionic sound effect. My own story is the British, NHS-funded version, which is why my article is called The Six Billion Dollar Man.
The official, near-verbatim record of everything said in the Houses of Parliament, named after the printer Thomas Curson Hansard.
Why it mattered
It’s a remarkable public archive: millions of speeches, free to read. I fed 1.7 million of them to two graphics cards to see whether MPs ever change each other’s minds.
Read: SQL Server 2025, an RTX 5090, and the slow death of “Will the hon. Gentleman give way?”
Britain's National Health Service, free at the point of use since 5 July 1948.
Why it mattered
Most of us only find out what it’s really worth when we need it most. I’ve needed it a lot, which is the subject of The Six Billion Dollar Man.
Writing material made from calfskin. The official copies of Acts of Parliament are still printed on it, after a 2016 attempt to switch to paper was overturned.
Why it mattered
Vellum lasts five hundred years. My 8,000 DVDs didn’t last twenty. That contrast is a lesson every data person should take seriously.
The polite way an MP asks to interrupt another MP mid-speech in the House of Commons.
Why it mattered
It sounds like courtesy and is usually an ambush. It’s also the closest Parliament gets to a real back-and-forth, which is why I went looking for whether it still happens.
Read: SQL Server 2025, an RTX 5090, and the slow death of “Will the hon. Gentleman give way?”
A sculpture by artist Patricia Piccinini for Australia's Transport Accident Commission, showing a human body redesigned to survive a car crash.
Why it mattered
Graham makes our fragility visible. He inspired Nigel, my imagined person with the world’s knowledge under the skin.
Read: Forget Graham, the Car Crash Man, Meet Nigel, the Data Man