Four friends and a ZX Spectrum
Some people — not those of the most recent generations — still remember this image with a certain nostalgia: a ZX Spectrum.
In my case, I was about 22 and living my youth in Portugal, together with three friends. There were four of us in all, a small, almost sacred group — inseparable friends, always together, with time for everything and that feeling so typical of youth that the days were long and there was always something to do.
We lived all kinds of adventures. Almost always innocent, often unpredictable and, now and then, a little reckless. All it took was the four of us being together for an ordinary afternoon to turn into a story.
It was a different time.
The music of young people back then lived on rewritable cassettes. Songs were recorded off the radio, sometimes after waiting patiently for the DJ to stop talking before the song began. People made mixtapes, lent cassettes to their friends, and the Walkman, clipped to the belt with the headphones on, let you take your music out into the street.
Parties could happen in a garage. A few improvised lights, a stereo, some carefully chosen cassettes, and the night's disco was ready.
At weekends there was also the ritual of the VHS tapes. You went to the video shop to pick a film, walked along the shelves, read the covers, argued about which one to take, and someone always ended up swearing that this one was really good. Then came the screening at home and, of course, the duty of rewinding the tape before returning it.
It was also around that time that some strange and fascinating machines began to appear in our lives: the first home computers.
One of them was the ZX Spectrum.
Today it seems almost impossible to explain, to someone used to smartphones, the Internet and instant games, the fascination that little rubber-keyed computer held.
A computer like that wasn't exactly cheap for a young Portuguese man in those days either. Those who could afford it might ask their parents. Others had to find another way.
That was the case for Luís, one of my three friends.
During the summer holidays he went to work in restaurants. He worked hard for weeks while many people our age enjoyed their holidays. But there was a very simple reason for all that effort: he liked earning his own money so that he could spend it on the things that really gave him pleasure.
He didn't work just to save money. He worked with a goal, often with a purchase already in mind. And when the end of the summer came, after many hours of work, he allowed himself to turn the money he had earned into something he truly wanted.
That is how, one of those summers, a ZX Spectrum came into our little world.
Officially, it belonged to Luís.
And, in that first encounter with the machine, he made a point of making sure we all understood that.
You plugged it into the television. Games came on audio cassettes. You put the cassette in the tape recorder, typed the command to load the program, and the wait began.
But that part had one peculiarity: the one handling the Spectrum was Luís.
We stood around, watching, almost unbearably anxious for the game to start and for our turn to finally come. He, on the other hand, was in no hurry at all.
He pressed the keys, adjusted the recorder's volume, rewound the cassette, doing everything with a calm that, for us, was maddening.
And perhaps that was precisely the fun of it for him.
He knew that, in that moment, he was the owner of the machine, the only one who mastered that little ritual and, above all, the centre of attention. While we waited impatiently, he savoured every second of that starring role, stretching the moment out a little longer before letting us into the game.
Then came the screeching of the cassette, the coloured stripes on the screen and another wait.
And it didn't always work.
Sometimes, after several minutes, it failed with an error.
For us it was almost a tragedy.
For him it was one more chance to fiddle with the computer again, adjust something and start all over, while we stayed there, hanging on the hope of finally seeing the game appear on the screen.
At the time nobody found that particularly absurd. It was part of the experience.
We just wanted to play.
He wanted to savour the moment.
And, knowing each other the way we did, it was inevitable that sooner or later something was bound to happen.
And it did.
One afternoon of magnificent rivalry, over one of the most sophisticated games of the time: Galaxy.
At the end there was an afternoon snack, served by Mrs Isabel, Luís's mother, who always supported us on those afternoons — even when our arguments made a not-so-pleasant racket.
P.S. — So that no one thinks they were forgotten: the other two partners in crime in this story were Francisco and Tony.