Living Up to the Hype
In the early 1980s, Brendan Dawes’s grandfather gave him a tiny computer. While he couldn’t do much on it compared to today’s advanced computers, “it forced me to learn how to code and program to make it do something”, Dawes recalls. “I was fascinated; I could type words into this black box and have it make things.” He first used his newfound coding powers for evil rather than good, in the form of a prank. He went into a branch of electronics store Dixon’s, where they had several ZX81 computers each joined up to a TV, and quickly reprogrammed each one to infinitely repeat “Dixons is sh*t” across the screen. “I guess that moment
