Speccy — The Past, the Future and the Aliens Around

Speccy — the past, the future and the aliens around.

There was time of plenty. It was possible to buy new software for Speccy in every grocery, there was meeting of fans in big city halls as there was too many freaks, in every prestige news paper was a column with some Speccy news. It looked like damn good era. But, was it for real?

Of course, everything have it's dark side. Probably first big scandal happened in deep 80's somewhere in South Africa. Few mental damaged ppl started a new religion. I don't know it's name, but they started to proclaim that Clive Sinclair is a holly man. Ok, it sound's quite inocent. But try to remember — they started a systematic genocide of atari and c64 users.

And, well, that's bad. Finaly it was first time when we heard about famous 3HC — 3 Hardware Comando. After few months they destroyed all that ill religion (with a half of whole Africa continent anyway). After this experience 3HC became popular and stayed on the guard. There was too many next accidents, some was big, some was local. Maybe you remember them.

Important is that we had a time of fun, there was no world wars (because near everybody were Speccy users) and there was a milions of various projects. Some of the big projects of 80's are still alive (for example neighbour's childs), some died. But we can be proud that we were moving with this litte planet for a very long time. The last time we heard about 3HC was in early 90's. Yes, right that time when all great things started to fail. Speccy was world dominating thing. There was average of 2 Speccies for each person on this planet between 10 and 74 years.

And that was the problem. As the biggest companies used Unix mainframes, there was a need to have someone who will administrate them. But all administrators were bored by that work and they prefered working on Speccy. And this was main problem. We were too close to the world economy colaps. And that's why the world's biggest countries stopped producing Speccies and also software for it. Speccy was named as danger thing and 3HC were prohibited. And that's why we are here now.

Current situation looks bad. There is very few new software releases, ppl don't understand each other very much, near no live meetings. And no chance to fill even just one big city hall. But there is few signals that future can be bright. I'll try to explain most interesting of them.

At first, let's move into space. I suppose that all of you know about ISS (well, this time it's not Intergalactic Speccy Session) — International Space Station. It's flying over our heads, colecting the scientific datas and various error messages generating by windoze. And that's the problem. NASA decided to kick off the current computer equipment and use somehing better.

The best is to use something, which is verified by ages. I guess you know what it mean — Speccy is slowly returning.

This is a little connected with another hot news — the aliens.

Well, i know that this words can ruin my career but i will risk it. Aliens are here. All happened in the half of the 80's when NASA put in the space secret military satelite. All project crashed, NASA lost the contact with that satelite during few hours and few years later they found it flying out of our solar system. And right about 2 years ago that satelite was back! A little alien star ship bring it back. Reason wasn't that it was too comic technology for them, so they wanted to see those funky creatures who made it. The reason was that someone forget in the satelite a tape with some strange sounds. After hard analyse aliens found that it's a program there! So, they came here to find what the programs are about. In fact, there was just Tasword, Flight simulation by Psion and some old demo by Quicksilva. But aliens were impressed by the computer technology (it's so simple and powerfull) that they buyied a license from Amstrad and wanna start the production for own technological success.

So, nothing is lost yet! Maybe on this damn planet, but Speccy found the way out and we can hope that one day ppl here will see what is meaning of the words — simple technology for each day using.

This is the end of this little report. If there is someone interested, i can write a full past reviews and bring some more news! See you next time!

ellvis/ZeroTeam ellvis@zeroteam.sk