Tweet
I generally have limited shrift for Gen X childhood nostalgia media. Things from the past turn up again. You have changed. They have not. You had to be there. But when Usborne released their 1980s computing kids books as free downloads, how much sharper than a serpent's tooth the pang of sentiment. It's hard to exaggerate how important these books were. Usborne's books were our YouTube. It's where kids went for diversion and information. There were no memes, or whimsy, or cat videos. Nobody had a video camera, and cats had only just been invented. All that lay in the future, which was exciting, assuming there was no nuclear apocalypse, which felt no better than even odds.
God, it's so odd talking to not-even-young people about the pre-digital, pre-internet, pre-mobile age. Of how there was no way to cheat at pub quizzes. Of how good you needed to be at recalling and imitating the thing you'd seen on TV last night because you'd probably never see it again. Of how you needed a physical copy of a thing to experience it. But here it is, an actual, factual printed book - well, a .pdf in a tab in a browser on a screen - thrillingly primitive-prescient, like the back of Marie Curie's envelopes, or Newton's beermat, a cosy guide to a new age. Shall we?
Read more…
More...