Timeline
From the 1980s to now
The machines, games and moments my stories keep coming back to, in the order they happened, with the stories I've written about each one. It starts with a rubber-keyed computer and ends with a database doing things it was never built for.
Before my time: Vellum, Hansard, The NHS, Richard Feynman, ICL, The Six Million Dollar Man, Z80
- 1400s Vellum: 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.
- 1909 Hansard: The official, near-verbatim record of everything said in the Houses of Parliament, named after the printer Thomas Curson Hansard.
- 1948 The NHS: Britain's National Health Service, free at the point of use since 5 July 1948.
- 1965 Richard Feynman: 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.
- 1968 ICL: International Computers Limited, Britain's own computer giant, which built mainframes for government and big business. Fujitsu later took it over.
- 1974 The Six Million Dollar Man: 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."
- 1976 Z80: Zilog's 8-bit processor, the brain inside the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC and countless other machines.
- 1980s
- 1980
People
Daley Thompson
The British decathlete who won Olympic gold in Moscow in 1980 and again in Los Angeles in 1984.
- 1980s
Computers
Cassette loading
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.
- 1980s
Computers
CompuServe
One of the first big online services, offering email, forums and files to dial-up subscribers before the web took off.
- 1980s
People
Sir Alan Sugar
Founder of Amstrad, which sold cheap hi-fis, computers and word processors. Amstrad bought Sinclair's computer business in 1986.
- 1980s
People
Sir Clive Sinclair
The inventor and entrepreneur behind the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, knighted in 1983. He was also responsible for the C5 electric tricycle.
- 1980s
Computers
Type-in listings
Pages of program code printed in computer magazines for readers to type in by hand, line by line.
- 1981
Computers
BBC Micro
Acorn's sturdy cream computer, built for the BBC's Computer Literacy Project. It was in nearly every British school.
- 1982
Computers
Commodore 64
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.
- 1982
Computers
ZX Spectrum
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.
- 1983
Games & Demos
Mastertronic
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.
- 1983
TV & Film
National Lampoon's Vacation
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.
- 1983
Computers
ZX Microdrive
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.
- 1984
Games & Demos
Amiga Boing Ball
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.
- 1984
Computers
Commodore 16
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.
- 1984
Games & Demos
Daley Thompson's Decathlon
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.
- 1984
Games & Demos
Elite
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.
- 1985
Computers
Amstrad PCW8256
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.
- 1985
Computers
Commodore Amiga
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.
- 1987
Games & Demos
Warhammer 40,000
Games Workshop's tabletop war game, played with painted miniature armies on a table covered in model scenery.
- 1988
Computers
AS/400
IBM's midrange business computer, the workhorse of warehouses, factories and banks. It still runs today under the name IBM i.
- 1990s
- 1990s
Computers
56k modem
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.
- 1990s
People
John Carmack
The programmer behind the engines of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, and co-founder of id Software.
- 1993
Games & Demos
Doom
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.
- 2010s
- 2016
Other
Graham
A sculpture by artist Patricia Piccinini for Australia's Transport Accident Commission, showing a human body redesigned to survive a car crash.
- Now
- 2026–2026
Writing
Forty-odd years later, I rebuild them in SQL Server
21 stories so far, from 9 Aug 2026 to 16 Oct 2026. The newest: