![]() ![]() Like the gang as a whole, this hacker hardcore was of disparate temperaments and ages - one of them, named Mike Dailly, was just 14 years old when he started showing up at the college - but they were united by a certain seriousness about computers, by the fact that computers for them were, rather than just a hobby or even a potential means of making a living, an all-consuming passion. To ensure a steady supply of games for his mates, he even joined a cracking group in the international piracy “scene” who called themselves the Kent Team.īut for the most dedicated of the Kingsway gang, Jones among them, trading and playing games was a diversion rather than the real point. Jones became one of the informal leaders of the collective. Both students of the college and interested non-students would meet regularly in the common areas to talk shop and, inevitably, to trade pirated games. Just as had Bruce Everiss’s Microdigital shop in Liverpool, Kingsway College was fomenting a hacking scene in Dundee, made up largely of working-class youths who but for this golden chance might have had to resign themselves to lives spent sweeping out warehouses. ![]() He came to Timex on an apprenticeship, which paid for him to take more computer courses at nearby Kingsway Technical College. One of the people they hired was David Jones, 18 years old and fresh out of an experimental new “computer studies” program that was being pioneered in Dundee. (It’s my understanding that the nose is removable.) By 1983, Timex was straining to keep up with demand for the little machines, hiring like mad in and around Dundee in order to keep the production lines rolling day and night.ĭavid Jones. The relationship continued with the ZX81, and then with Sinclair’s real heavy hitter, the Spectrum. ![]() In 1980, Sinclair Research subcontracted out most of the manufacture of their new ZX80 home computer to the Timex plant in Dundee. Among the electronics companies that came to Dundee was Timex, the Norwegian/Dutch/American watchmaking conglomerate. Dundee convinced the American company National Cash Register Corporation, better known as NCR, to build their principal manufacturing plant for Britain and much of Europe there as early as 1945, and by the 1960s the city was known throughout Britain as a hub of electronics manufacture. And one of these vectors of economic possibility - yet again as in Liverpool - was electronics. Leaders in Dundee, as in Liverpool, worked earnestly to find new foundations for their city’s economy. Like Imagine, DMA was born in a city far from the cultural capitals of Britain - even farther away than Liverpool, in fact, all the way up in Dundee, Scotland.ĭundee as well had traditionally been a working-class town that thrived as a seaport, until the increasing size of merchant ships gradually made the role untenable over the course of the twentieth century. There are some interesting parallels between the early days of DMA Design and the early days of Imagine Software, that predecessor to Psygnosis. People have a way of surprising you sometimes. From their generic teenage-cool titles to their rote gameplay, both games were as typical of Psygnosis as anything else in their catalog.Īnd yet DMA Design - and particularly their leader, David Jones - did in fact have abilities as yet undreamt of. Certainly Menace and Blood Money, the two games DMA had already created for Psygnosis, gave little sign that any visionaries lurked within their ranks. If you had looked at the state of Psygnosis in 1990 and tried to decide which of their outside developers would break the mold of beautiful-but-empty action games, you would have no reason to single out DMA Design over any of the others. (courtesy of the January 1991 issue of The One) They burn in hell - like distress flares.” “Mummy, when a lemming dies does it go to heaven like all good little girls?” “Mummy, what’s a group of lemmings called?” ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |