Wings Over Scotland

The 16K ZX Spectrum was definitely the ginger stepchild of the family of micros that defined home computing in the UK in the 1980s. With far less memory available to coders (just 9K) than a 16K ZX81, the £125 cost of the entry-level model – shockingly the equivalent of £416 now – didn’t get you all that much bang for your buck when it launched, even by the standards of April 1982.

The vast majority of purchasers wisely chose to save up the extra £50 for the 48K version (£175, or a hefty £582 in 2023 money, although still peanuts compared to the Commodore 64’s launch price of £1,327 equivalent), and the 16K Speccy very quickly fell out of favour. In fact it was withdrawn from sale after barely over a year on the shelves, with old stocks cleared at £99.

(There are no official figures for how many of the 5 million Spectrums sold were 16Ks, but Home Computing Weekly reported in May 1983 that 300,000 machines in total were sold in the first year, and in August 1983 Popular Computing Weekly reported that the 48K had outsold the 16K by two to one, so we can make a reasonable guess at somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 units of the 16K in the year and a bit it was on sale, or roughly 3% of all Spectrums.)

But even in its very brief life (the vast bulk of these titles were released in 1983), the 16K machine amassed a library of fun games that left the catalogues of many better-specced computers in the dust. And for no particular reason other than that 40 years have passed since it abruptly met its fate, we’re here to celebrate them.

So sit yourself down with one of the last cans of Lilt (or don’t, because it’s full of poisonous artificial-sweetener chemicals now), get ready to fondly remember a few old favourites, and hopefully also discover some lost gems for the first time.

Read the rest of this entry →

There’s still nothing happening in Scottish politics, so inspired by the Hieland Coo from yesterday’s godawful Economist front-page story, and for those of you who don’t use Twitter, and by reader request, meet some of my new friends from the last couple of weeks of strolling around Bath, guarding against ursine incursion.

Because VIGILANCE MUST BE MAINTAINED AT ALL TIMES.

Read the rest of this entry →

This is a wretchedly boring time to be writing about politics for a living, readers. Parliamentarians in Edinburgh and London haven’t technically checked out for the summer yet – Holyrood still has a month to go before taking two months off, while Westminster is currently having a couple of weeks off for “Whitsun”, whatever the hell that is, before coming back for a month and a half then sodding off until September.

But really they’re already at the “bringing board games in” stage of term, and both the elected chambers and the media already have their eyes on the beach, which probably explains why we’re being punted drivel like this.

Even if we must afford the graphics team some grudging kudos for the unicoo.

Read the rest of this entry →

Wait, has Nicola Sturgeon died? We didn’t see anything on the news.

Because there are only a limited number of possible reasonable explanations for why police wanting to find out what Nicola Sturgeon knew about something would ask people who aren’t Nicola Sturgeon.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s a bit disappointing to see an Italian-born man play into Mafia stereotypes.

“Nice indy movement you’ve got there. Be a shame if anything… happened to it.”

Read the rest of this entry →

When I was a boy at Balbardie Primary School in Bathgate in the mid-70s, football was banned in the playground. Of course we were all fitba-daft laddies, so we sought ways around the prohibition. Occasionally someone would bring in a tennis ball, but those were difficult to control in school shoes and also apt to fly over the wall of the outdoor toilet block if somebody caught one sweetly on the volley.

So most playtimes somebody would produce a tin of Pepsi or Irn-Bru or Cresta, chug the contents, stand the empty container on its end and stomp sharply on it, producing something more akin to an ice-hockey puck that would serve for our kickabout.

But even after being skelped and scudded around a concrete playground into stone walls for 20 minutes, that can was still in better shape at the end of our game than the one the SNP have been kicking down the road since 2016.

Read the rest of this entry →

He just can’t grasp anything, can he?

Because no, they don’t.

Read the rest of this entry →

If you’re still falling for this idiot-fodder after seven years, give yourself a shake.

Because for the love of Christ, an orangutan would have twigged by now. And we’re not talking about the long-suffering fans of Dundee United.

Read the rest of this entry →

The SNP now seem to be involved in some sort of competition where they dare each other to come up with the most blatant insult to their own members and/or the wider independence movement and see just how much they can get people to put up with.

First up was this drivel:

Humza Yousaf is leader of the SNP, a political party whose defining purpose – arguably its SOLE real purpose – is the pursuit of Scottish independence, but his “vision for Scotland” didn’t include a single mention of it.

Instead, Yousaf intends to spend the next three years on “equality”, “opportunity” and “community”, three meaningless buzzwords which every political party on Earth would claim to be in favour of. He might as well have identified his key values as kittens, lollipops and hugs.

But it gets worse.

Read the rest of this entry →