Back in the Eighties, when you thought yourself lucky if you had a 16K Spectrum instead of a 1K ZX80 or a ZX81 with a 16K RAM pack which fell off at the slightest touch, I used to edit Sinclair Programs magazine. Kids wrote programs and sent them in on cassettes, I played them all and the best ones were printed off and listed in the magazine. The kids made £25, the publishers got the editorial content of an entire magazine for about £800 (actually twice that, cos we had an illustration drawn for each picture).

You can still find Sinclair Programs games listed on the Internet if you’re keen on shoot-em-up games written in elementary Basic.

Why am I blogging this? Well, I lust found an interview  with Peter Brown, executive editor of the Free Software Foundation http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,39020463,39263218,00.htm

Must be one of the best things anyone has ever said about my work:

“When I was a kid, I had a Sinclair ZX-81, with 1KB of memory. At the time — back in 1984 or 85 — if you wanted to play a game you couldn’t buy a CD, so you had to buy one of the listing magazines, like Sinclair Programs.  You had to look at the listing of computer code and type it into your machine. The keyboard was terrible — it was simply a flat piece of plastic. At the end you would try to run the program, and if it didn’t run you would have to correct any syntax errors.
“Over time, I slowly worked out why errors occurred and started to learn how to program in Basic. At one point, I sent a game I had written to Sinclair Programs, and they accepted it for publication and sent me a cheque for £25. As soon as I sent off the first game, I started writing the next one.

“So, the magazine arrived and my game was inside and they’d drawn a nice big cartoon for it. Unfortunately, when I flicked to the editorial for magazine it said, ‘this is the last ever edition of the magazine.’ It was basically saying that in the future people will not share source code and won’t type code into computers — they’ll buy games on physical media instead.

“What was funny was that this was the September 1985 edition of the magazine, which was a month before the Free Software Foundation was created, in response to the fact that people were taking [open] computer code and turning it into proprietary code.

“Looking back at it now, overnight my world was destroyed, because the listing magazine was destroyed. It just became about playing code, rather than writing code. That was the last time I ever did any programming.”