The first home computer

Text 1: The Blinking Square, by Gareth Penhallow

An original twentieth-century memoir.

The computer arrived on a Saturday in November 1983, in a box so large that my father had to carry it up the garden path like a man bringing home a wardrobe. My sister and I watched from the front window, noses pressed to the glass, as if he were delivering a spaceship.

It was not, in truth, very much to look at: a slab of black plastic with rubber keys that felt like pencil erasers, and a wire that plugged into the back of the television. But when my father switched it on, the screen filled with a pale grey glow and a single line of text, and beneath it a small square of light began to blink. On, off. On, off. It seemed to be waiting for us. It seemed, I thought, to be alive.

We spent that whole weekend typing in programs from a magazine, page after page of numbers and strange words, our fingers clumsy, our eyes aching. Every mistake meant hunting through hundreds of lines for a missing comma. My mother brought sandwiches to the living room and was ignored. Outside, the other children rode their bikes up and down the street; inside, the curtains stayed drawn and the glow of the screen painted our faces blue.

On Sunday night, at a quarter to eleven, it worked. A tiny, square-headed man walked across the screen, jumped over a barrel, and fell down a hole. That was all. We played it forty times.

I work with computers now, and the machine on my desk is a thousand times more powerful than that black slab. It has never once blinked at me the way that first cursor did, as if the whole future were sitting just behind the glass, asking politely to be let in.

Explore how Gareth Penhallow uses language and structure to describe the arrival of his family’s first computer.

Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.