When ‘digital’ came to town

I still remember the Christmas my sister was given one of the very first computer games as a gift from our parents. Plugged into our television it allowed us to play a virtual game of tennis, batting what I now know to be a collection of pixels against the sides of the screen, so it bounced randomly around.

I must have been about 11 at the time and I still recall the recognition that something fundamental had changed about the world I lived in, although it was to be several decades later that I ...