The sound of the 1980s isn't Johnny Marr's guitar, or the starter motor of a Mini Metro, or the theme tune to Dallas.

The sound of the 1980s is sqee-sqee-kkaa-sqee which is the noise a ZX Spectrum game used to make while it was loading.

This year the Spectrum is 30 years old, which is a good opportunity to remember just how exciting it was at the time. Many of us already had the predecessor, the ZX81, but that was black and white and all you could do was make your name scroll down the screen. Even so, we thought: wow, in the future, we will all be able to make our names scroll down screens in black and white.

Then the Spectrum arrived and it was exhilarating, like being shouted at by angry primary colours. My favourite game was Hungry Horace, which featured a character with a blue head who liked skiing. I have no idea what it meant but this was the 1980s – it made no sense but that didn't matter, just like Duran Duran videos.

And now, to mark the Spectrum's birthday, the British Film Institute is throwing a party in London and, even though I loved my Spectrum, I won't be there because, in the end, I don't like where the home computer eventually took us: to Twitter and Kindles and to the cold, dead eyes of commuters staring into their mobiles.

Which is the problem with progress? In the early days, it's wonderful. In the 1920s, only a few pioneers drove cars. In the 1950s, only a handful of heroes climbed Everest. In the 1980s, only a small group of people spoke into mobiles.

And then everyone muscles in and something wonderful and strange becomes ubiquitous and ugly. Progress is good, but only in the hands of the first, clever, beautiful pioneers.