In The Chair: Chris Cannon
He was right at the heart of the early Liverpool software scene when the city was at the centre of the whole computer games revolution. Prepare for some manic tales from Chris
The former Bug-byte and Software Projects employee looks back at his career
The eyes of the world were on Liverpool in the Sixties thanks to The Beatles but when you were growing up there in the Seventies and Eighties, did it feel like it was on the decline? Massively. It was a bit of a shithole, to be honest. It was dirty, rundown, loads of empty shops, lots of deprivation… The people were great, though, and there were plenty of them that looked beyond that, in music and in computers.
Did the emerging world of home computers offer you a way out?
I was really into electronics, a proper geeky kid, and must have been unbearable. I used to buy components from the Tandy shop in Bootle, where I lived. It was in the Strand shopping centre, made infamous years later because of the Jamie Bulger murder. One day in the summer holidays, 1979 I think, I went in and there was this computer there, a TRS-80. I did the usual thing of typing in ‘Hello Chris’ and it just felt special, having this machine you could command. I stayed there all day. The manager did know me and said I could come back tomorrow… as long as I brought my mum in to check it was okay. I was only 12 years old! I spent all summer in the shop and eventually ended up getting a job there.
So you learned to program on the TRS-80? Yeah, I used to go to the Computer Centre in Liverpool. It was just a cordoned off area in the back of a shop in St John’s Precinct where kids a bit older than me would be playing around on their computers. I got talking to them and they told me about the TRS-80 User Group, which sounded like a great idea. We’d meet at the back of the shop on a Saturday afternoon and I learned a lot from them about programming in Assembly language. Then one day this kid called Matthew Smith came along.
Ah the man who would go on to write
Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. What was your first impression of him?
Arsehole. Absolute arsehole. He was the big ‘I am’. We’d be showing stuff we’d done and he’d be like, ‘Now look what I’ve done. I’ve sold my game.’ But when you got to know him, he was alright. He was a nice guy, really. He was very introverted and insular so when he came across with this bravado, it was all show.
Computer shops seem–– more than just retail outlets back then. They seem to have acted as hubs for coders to meet and make plans.
What made them so special was that the management didn’t throw us out. They allowed a bunch of like-minded kids to hang about. I’d sometimes go to Bruce Everiss’ shop, Microdigital, on Brunswick Street and got to know Mark Butler and Eugene Evans who worked there.
Mark Butler went on to set up Imagine Software, and in the documentary Commercial Breaks, he comes over as a bit of a wideboy…
Mark was a lovely bloke, but think about it. He’s just out of his teens and he’s effectively become a millionaire. Of course he’s going to be up himself.
Eugene Evans would become the poster boy for Imagine, as the archetypal teenage ‘whizz kid’ programmer, making a fortune from writing games.
I love Eugene. He was a very clever lad. I remember he used to wear this T-shirt which said, ‘I’m bilingual. I speak BASIC and Pascal.’ He was more into the 6502 side of things and we were the Z80 gang, so that made them the scummy ones. I’m sure they thought the same about us.
I told her my careers teacher I was going to program computer games and she said it was a flash in the pan and would be over in two years Chris Cannon