Now, hopefully at long last and a vast financial layout by moi (well
£3.50p for 4 of the same pictures taken in one of those little photo
booths in our local post office where the other 3 were taken, but I
wasn't robbing the post office, that act is planned for one Monday
morning), anyway, as per usual I digress....Read on. With the screenshots of our Crypt lads (Ian Fyvie, Ray Hawkins, Craig
Daines, Francis Loch, Ian Urie and Steve Evans and uncle Tom Cobbly
and all) being bought to you via a picture of the above lads all
together on one page as though they were on the pages of a police
criminals list (they are really) for various reason's all the
pictures never showed me, but I suppose that was due to the fact of
me being so ugly that I never wanted to scare the kiddies.... So, with the inclusion of a new Eyetech Mustek 600CP scanner package
which I bought a little while ago I was recently able to get my photo
taken then slap the picture into my scanner and here's the result.
Yes, scary I know, that was one of the reason's why I had to go into
our local post office first in order to check out that there were no
children around. Ok, so they've seen Freddie Kruger in The Nightmare
on Elm Street films, and they may have seen the recently shown on
telly film called "The Excorcist", but believe you me, seeing Dr.
Jekyll like this is enough to even make our beloved Dungeon Master
hide in a convent. Yes, I did say "Convent", not a monastery, well
it's a pretty well known fact with the lads of the earlier Crypt days
that the Dungeon Master has been caught in either very compromising
places or compromising positions. Well, about 2 years ago he was caught in a farmers barn in the
company of about 6 sheep, no, not a company of wolves, but sheep, and
you know, till this day we never know why he was there, unless he was
trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Anyway, again I digress for the true story at hand......ME. Being one of the founder members of the earlier diskmag versions of
The Crypt along with Dungeon Master and a couple of other folks I
have like Ray seen our mag change from a mere 20 or so disk posted
event and to what it's become now, a worldwide webmag, and although
in the earlier days we could write and say almost anything we wanted
to say, even bad language and the like, those days were great in one
sense of the word, but circulation was very small. Now, in the
somewhat censored version, swearing is an a minimum, but the best
part is that circulation is on a par that we in The Crypt have never
know before, so I as one of the founders of our mag want to say to
all of you who take the time to read it on the web "THANKS A MILLION
FOR TAKING THE TIME", without you we wouldn't be there. Anyway, enough of this "Namby Pamby" stuff. Here's a bit about me, I
did a very similar this called "My Profile" in our early days with
The Crypt, but we were only a disk-based mag then, so I dare say
that all the new readers abroad never got to read my article, so here
goes..... I won't bore you with the unimportant details about how I was born in
a stable with animals on Christmas Eve and how three wise men and
three shepherds came to see how I was keeping, that's all in the
past. I won't even tell you about me dad, GOD - That's another story
huh! So, who am I, why am I here, where did I come from and where do I
come from now, and where should I go now? Well, we normally start at
the beginning, so seeing as though I'm telling the story I'll jump to
the end bit first. So where should I go now? Well suggestions have
been many, ranging from the impossible and going to the sheer insane
ones, and even going to the physical impossible ones, of which I've
tried most, but the person who suggested that I crawl up my own anus
and whistle dixie should know by now that I'm not very good a
whistling, so that suggestion is out of the question. The suggestion about me going far away of which I've actually forgot
the actual wording sounds good to me even though I did know my
parents?? Anyway, with all this verbal diarrhoea being said, I reckon that it's
about time I got on with the job at hand....don't you, right, here
goes..... Apart from the normal 60's kids education like borstal, approved
school, detention centres, muggins, arson, manslaughter, etc., I led
a pretty normal lifestyle in my adolescent years (I'm only kidding
about the approved schools DC etc ok) my parents were in the Iron &
Steel business, my mum used to iron and my dad used to steel, ok,
it'll get better I hope as my story goes on. Some years ago my dad took up photography, but lost all his equipment
when the local police raided our home one night and took some piccies
of what my dad said were landscape photos. But I found one which the
police had missed, yes, it was of a landscape, but it a big black
woman with massive boobs laying naked in a field with about 4 men
with her, enough said. Times and money got so hard a few years ago that mum had to take in
washing, but she was later released after all the missing washing was
reunited with it's relevant owners.... I was about 10 years old, I was so annoyed at the milkman leaving all
the bottles of milk on peoples doorsteps which might have resulted in
people falling over the bottles, causing them to break and do harm to
themselves, so I decided to take all the milk and bottles home, but I
was let off with a caution. Anyway, I was about 28 years old, and until then I hadn't used any
computers at all, I had a mate at that time who lived over in
Redditch, I was married to my first wife Helen, but I won't say much
about her. Anyway, my mate John had a new wife called Penny (his 2nd
marriage), eventually one Saturday John & Penny came over to my house
in Warwick, cutting a long story short, over the next few weeks John
& Penny visited Helen and myself most weekends, eventually John &
Penny suggested that Helen, me and our two kiddies Steven Jnr. and
Kerryann went over to stay at John & Penny's house in Redditch one
weekend, so we did. So one Saturday John came over in his car to pick us 4 up to take
over to his house, we got to Redditch about half an hour later, we
had some lunch, my two kids were left to play outside in the garden
with John & Penny's two kids, which allowed Penny & Helen to have a
good old chinwag. John suggested that him and me went fishing to a
little private lake up the road from him, so we did, and caught quite
a few tench & carp, we packed up about 6-8 hours later, put the fish
back and went home to John's place. The rest of the weekend was ok, but being away from home was a nice
change, I still prefer my own home comforts, John's place was a bit
of a shithole anyway. After John, me & the two woman had finished
talking we all decided to go back home to Warwick on the following
Thursday, instead on the Sunday night, I wasn't working at the time,
I wasn't even a self-employed Painter & Decorator, and our two kids
weren't quite old enough to start school yet, so we stayed at John &
Penny's place a few more days (yawn). Monday eventually came and John suggested that we all go down to a
community centre near where they lived and which was used by
unemployed people like us as a day centre and a nursery type thing
for kiddies, apparently John's mate "Ec" (which is supposedly
pronounced like "Heck" without the "H") would be there with is ZX
Spectrum, "ZX Spectrum" what's one of those mate" I replied, "A
Computer you prat" John replied, "God, boring or what" I replied. Anyway, we got to the centre, met most of the people there, I played
a few games of snooker of which I won most because at that time in my
life I was a lazy sod so I spent most of my dole money on playing
snooker in our local town of Leamington Spa main snooker hall, I soon
became a bit of a legend in the centre for beating most of the
so-called top players, I was good, they were crap, end of story,
Monday afternoon was to partly change my future thought about
computers, and would soon have me hooked line and sinker as they say. John introduced me to "Ec" and his ZX Spectrum 48k computer, which at
first I found almost as exciting as being hit in the testicles with a
football, which as you'd know if it has or had ever happened to any
of you isn't that exciting, very painful yes, exciting "NO". Anyway, John and myself stood by "Ec" and watched him play a classic
old speccy games called "Bombjack", and I was surprised to find that
within a few minutes of watching this little character running &
jumping around the various screens collecting bombs while trying to
avoid the various aliens I was started to get very interested, so
after an hour or so of watching how "Ec" pressed certain keys to move
this little character I decided that I wanted to have a go,
eventually I did, I was killed almost straight away, but I had got
the "Computer bug", I wanted my own computer. We stayed at this centre for a couple more hours and then went back
to John and Penny's place for some food, later that night, John took
me along the road a few houses to where his mate Ian and his missus
Lynda lived, Ian introduced me to his customized ZX81 which had 1Mb
of standard memory, and a 16k RAMpack upgrade memory module fitted to
it. We played a couple of ZX81 games which were total crap, well
compared to "Ec's" 48k Spectrum. Ian let me type in a game (which
was in computer jargon such as GOTO, GOSUB and IF L=10 etc) out of a
ZX81k computer book, the game was supposedly a card game, 8 hours
later of typing the game code had been all typed in, I moved the ZX81
a bit, and cause a crash resulting in all my work being lost to what
Ian said was then called "RAMPack Wobble", so I typed all the code
again, then this time managed to save the code to a cassette tape. Upon loading the saved game code the tape got tangled up in the
cassette motor, thus destroying all my hard work yet again, so I
stood firm by my commitment to learn to use computers and typed all
the code into the ZX81 yet again for the third time, hurray, no
crash, no tape tangle, but a crap game came up, so all my time was
utterly wasted, and it was then that I decided to stay well and truly
clear of ALL ZX81's for ever, but I still wanted a 48k Spectrum
computer. Thursday morning came and Helen, me & our kids went back to our own
house in Warwick, the weekend came and I popped over to Leamington to
see my aunty in order that she might lend me enough money to get my
own 48k Spectrum computer and extra bits. Anyway, she did, so a day
later I had my very own Speccy, well, as we all know only to well
computers change like the weather, well, not so much in those days as
they do nowadays, anyway, a few months of having the 48k Speccy with
a totally crappy rubber keyboard Sir Clive Sinclair bought out the
first- ever proper hard QWERTY keyboard out and a new speccy all
parcelled up in a nice new computer called the Spectrum 48k+. I wanted one, so I saved up madly and bought one. Bloody hell Alan
Sugar bought out Sinclair and thus a new dawn of computers were soon
to hit the streets, a new Spectrum 128k was soon out, followed a
short time later by the Spectrum +2 which was a 128k Speccy (powerful
or what) with a cassette recorder housed in the same case as the
speccy allowing the user to safe date to cassette tape, or to play
games from tape, ok, but very slow. Oh no, a few months later saw the release of yet Sugar's 3rd new
speccy in the shape of the Spectrum +3, yet again it was a 128K based
speccy, but as with the 128, +2 and now the +3 you could either use
the computer in 128k mode or soft reset it to the original 48k
hardware, which allowed for older software to run on the beast, and
the part of the +3 was the inclusion of a 3" floppy drive unit, so
now all our data could be save to floppy disk, but at about £3 per
disk at first, they were too expensive to be able to buy loads at a
time, but the prices per disk dropped a bit as time went on. As time went on Speccy stuff seemed to dry up a bit, contacts were
few and far between, so I changed over to another computer format, I
went onto an Amstrad 48k computer, then Amstrad bought out a 128k RAM
upgraded that fitted to the back of the computer via one of it's many
ports, a chip also had to be replaced with another on the actual
motherboard, eventually a proper full 128k Amstrad was bought out and
called something like a "6128", so I bought one of those, it was
during my Amstrad 48k/6128 days that Ray and myself found each other
due to one of my other Amstrad contacts called Matthew Glover I
think, MG was as they say "A Bit of a Spanner", thick in other words,
and believe you me, he was thick. For those of us who have had dealings with another miggy user called
Gary Emery who I thought was an utter prat, MG made GE looking
brilliant, but that's another story. Ray and I got very matey, and from day one we both seemed to get on
more like brothers than computer contacts, as with us both, you get
what you see so to speak, no in-between stuff, if you treat us both
decently, then we'll do the same to you, but treat us badly, well,
need I say more.... After some time on the Amstrad Ray told me during a phonecall that he
was going over to the Amiga, a week or so later during another
phonecall to him he had changed over systems, during the following
months I also went over to the Amiga but then we spent the next few
months we took turns in going from an Amiga 500, 500+ and A600, well,
I stayed clear of the A600, I did and still think that model was a
bloody joke, during all this time it was Ray who seemed to get the
better upgrades faster than me, but then, ha, I beat him once by
getting my bog standard A1200 before him I think, did I Ray, it's
been such a long time, I forget????. Once we were both on the A1200 platform, our rivalry still went on,
he was way ahead on me getting his first decent Amiga monitor, I
ended up using a TV with scart connector for ages, it was only a few
months ago I was able to afford to buy a half-decent monitor in the
shape of a 14" Philips CM8833-II, of which I've still got.... During our Amstrad days Ray was the editor of an Amstrad- based
newsletter called "Amscircle", I joined up and we've been mates ever
since, which up till now is getting on for 10 years, a long time to
know a contact who has since for many years turned out to be one of
my best over computer mates, but one of which who I've never met face
to face, but hope to do one day, just so he can dip in his holey
pocket and but me a pint of Southern Comfort....(snigger). After some time on the Amiga Ray wanted us to create an Amiga diskmag
which I decided to call "Bits 'n' bytes", ok, so not a very original
name, it was a WB-only mag because we both knew very little about the
miggy and it's capabilities, since then, Rays miggy knowledge has
grown to about a ratio of 10-1 against my knowledge, as far as Amiga
software knowledge goes, Ray has (metaphorically speaking) left me
behind with my Amstrad 6128, anyway, Bits 'n' Bytes ran for a while,
but do to lack of commitment by the other lads, we decided to give
up, a few months later during a phone call in a public phonebox on a
road across a public playing field from my home in Rugby, Ray asked
if I'd be interested in starting up another diskmag of which he
hadn't thought of a name yet. At first there would be Ray who'd call himself "Dungeon Master" as he
was a sort of boss/leader, Ray's Son Justin would be in the mag and
call himself "Dr. Blood", Ray's wife Wendy would also be in and
would call herself "Nymph", I was stuck for a name, various names
were suggested, but not printable nowadays, it took an outsider to
suggest that with my surname of "Hyde" why don't I call myself "Dr.
Jekyll", another of our Amiga contacts called Ian Dawney was now in
the mag and due to him being a big tall ginger-haired lad, he'd
decided to call himself "Ginger Ninja", and so with Ray deciding on a
name of our mag as "The Crypt" he asked all of us for our approval,
we agreed, and so "The Crypt" was born..... And as they say, the rest is history ... Catch U L8ter folks