Hacker News Reader

Comment by sharken | Hacker News Reader

For me the ZX Spectrum is defined by the competition with Commodore 64.

When faced with the difficult decision between Spectrum or C64, i turned to my older cousin for advice.

He recommended the Spectrum so that was chosen. However in hindsight the quirky keyboard, colour clash and less impressive sounds made the C64 look like the superior choice.

Colour clash can be seen in this link: https://www.nomadsreviews.co.uk/post/the-history-of-video-ga...

Still, the Spectrum had some awesome games back then, such as Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy.

View on HN

>He recommended the Spectrum so that was chosen. However in hindsight the quirky keyboard, colour clash and less impressive sounds made the C64 look like the superior choice.

64 was and is clearly the better choice over Spectrum—superior in every single way other than perhaps the BASIC—but the relatively small price difference even then (and even more 40 years later) was enough to cause many Britons to choose the latter. That said, there is a reason why 64 dominated the wealthier US, Canada, Germany, and Australia.

The prices weren't close in NZ, 11yr me paid NZ$525 for my spectrum, and C64s were well over NZ$800 about the same time - that was an unimaginable extra year or more of delivering newspapers on top of the two I'd already spent. I think the gap closed a lot later on.

Did Spectrum have much market share in New Zealand? I don't believe it did in Australia. (Same with BBC Micro; its power supply fails in Australian temperatures.)

I think it was pretty popular (totally guessing), probably 2nd place behind the C64 in terms of those home/game oriented 8bit machines. There were about the same amount of spectrum vs C64 games in the shops.

The weird thing was that nobody I knew had the same computer - in my circle of friends and family, there was a ZX81, my Spectrum, a Vic20, a C64, an Apple II, a TRS-80, a BBC Micro, and a friends family even had a Dick Smith computer (after some searching it might've been a VZ-300). Only the ZX81 and the Spectrum got any programming done on them though :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com