British PCs of the 1980s | Hacker News Reader

British PCs of the 1980s

arstechnica.com

80 pointsmariuz60 comments

I grew up around a bunch of these machines (and more besides, like the Oric). My dad wrote programming books for many of them, and was even on the front cover of the first Dragon User magazine:

https://archive.org/details/dragon-user-magazine-01/mode/1up

I’ve been feeling bad lately because I started programming at about six or seven and my kids haven’t been hugely interested (my oldest child’s computer teacher laments that most of his class don’t know what files and folders are). Reminiscing about this list of machines reminds me just how naff they all were, however lovable. You had to really work quite hard to drag much fun or utility out of them. Only eating what you can kill teaches quite a lot, I guess.

What was wonderful is that you could get value in one or two lines of code. No NPM or JS stack, no jar hell, no servers…you had all you needed on day 1. You also created without all the fluff. It was like programming with wire drawings, where the absence of perfect image and sound and video meant a you were dealing with real basics. Just drawing a circle might mean using cos and sin. Printing graphics might mean binary to switch dots on and off.

Those ads bring back so many memories. What a wonderful time.

I got to learn to code using the school’s BBC Micros (and later, Archimedes), a sibling’s VIC-20 and a CPC6128 at a time when my peers had Atari STs and Amiga 500s (my family were a lot poorer). I loved all of them in different ways.

And while the unique hardware architectures were interesting, for me the really exciting part of this era was that computing was something you did/made at least as much as you consumed. Modern consumerist computing habits make me a little sad (but I still love my iPad Pro).

Typing in pages of BASIC you didn’t understand is one level. Writing your own code and making something new is another. And pretty much every single owner in the U.K. engaged in that process, there were books, TV series, it was part of the school curriculum until the age of 14 that everyone had to some coding, you name it.

The first book I used on BBC BASIC was an Usborne book that they’ve now made available for free download (the first one is my first book): https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books

Consider the age group it targeted, and the fact it was about 50 pages long.

Where is today’s equivalent? Well, Usborne has some newer titles: https://usborne.com/gb/books/browse-by-category/science-and-...

They look pretty OK, but only one seems to get into the nitty gritty, and I’ve never seen them in the coding section of my local bookshops in London. I wonder if there is even the smallest appetite for these in families any more. It feels like coding as a kid only ever happens if it’s a family trade (a parent codes), or has a teacher who wants their class to explore what’s possible a bit. My niece was told she was too young to learn to code at 12, but I learned BASIC and was diving in deep at the age of 11…

The fact Harvard CS50 might be a first experience of building software for a bunch of people starting at University is slightly depressing (despite it being a very polished course).

"it was part of the school curriculum until the age of 14 that everyone had to some coding"

Not when I was at school in the 80s it wasn't. We had some school computers (PETs, RM 380Z), but one had to be proactive to use them. They were not used as part of any syllabus. I recall there was a computing option available, but it was useless, and AFAIK did not include coding.

Possibly post 1984 when the school got a bunch of Beebs, it may have been added, but by then I was past the leaving age (15/16 at the time), and in the 6th form.

Anyway, the joys of 6502 assembly, Z80 / 8080 assembly, and using CP/M.

An even earlier machine which hasn't been mentioned yet was the UK101, I got a second hand one of those in the early 80s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK101

I loved my BBC micro. I borrowed a book from a library that gave me a few hundred line of BASIC software I had to type in. It was great.

My school got one (in Malaysia). It was the first computer I ever used. Typing BASIC programs in from magazines and saving them out to cassette tape. Good times. It felt magical.

You need to watch Micro Men (2009 docudrama).

https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM

There's also a version with the reactions from some of the people featured there.

I found these 2:

Micro Men - 10th Anniversary - With Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser https://youtu.be/yaonVYOTSsk

Micro Men - 10th Anniversary - The Chat After the Film https://youtu.be/l4I2ktcWdJM

The level of cope from C64 owners in this thread is particularly high.

Ah, memories...

I started programming on my zx Spectrum 128k - borrowed a book from school. I say 'programming', it was mostly typing out what the book said

For American readers, the Amstrad was launched by the guy who hosted The Apprentice TV Show in the UK, who named it after himself (initials AMS). It'd be grossly unfair to call Lord Sugar the British Trump for a number of reasons (he didn't come from money, he's a billionaire, etc), but still:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sugar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad

> It'd be grossly unfair to call Lord Sugar the British Trump

Indeed but…

- he made his money from property development rather than business lucky break on Sky boxes aside)

- he’s not an entrepreneur in the way the Apprentice portrays

- he lectures people on needing to work from the office while he works from Florida

- …

- has a habit of posting faintly racist things on Twitter

Donald Trump is a billionaire as well, maybe wealthier than Lord Sugar.

I don't know that much about either of them, but I'm not convinced that it's "grossly unfair" to draw that comparison.

That is the new stuff. I had a Nascom2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nascom

I too started with the Spectrum 48K, but that article is missing the Sinclair QL that, along with the Acorn Archimedes, was ahead of it's times. By far, IMHO.

The British PCs were actually rather poor. The Commodore 64 was the second best selling computer in Britain during the 1980s. The Sinclair Spectrum was just cheap which was why it sold more but it was pretty poor.

Yes, the Spectrum was poor, but it was also genius and a case study on how to deliver a brilliant balance between performance and production cost.

The existence of Elite and Driller running on such limited hardware at all is a product of true genius. Anyone decrying the Speccy doesn’t understand the impact of the price differential on its utility and popularity. No-one I knew had a BBC Micro (although they were in our schools).

All computers of the 1980s were pretty poor, but that misses the point. The Spectrum was less than half the price of a Commodore 64. It sold to households and children that couldn’t have afforded or thought about buying anything more expensive and had a profound impact on computer literacy

https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/clive-sinclairs-zx-spec...

>"You could buy a Spectrum at WH Smith's for £125, take it home -- it would take you two or three weeks to go through the programming manual, if you're that way inclined," Goodwins said.

"Then start digging into the machine. You could, within two or three months, be writing little games that were actually pretty good, and in six months you could have something that was as good as the rest of the market. By yourself. While going to school. Kaboom! This is where the UK game industry came from."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_in_the_United_Ki...

> This industry took off after the release of the ZX Spectrum in 1982: by the end of 1983 there were more than 450 companies selling video games on cassette compared to 95 the year before. An estimated 10,000 to 50,000 youth, mostly male, were making games out of their homes at this time based on advertisements for games in popular magazines. The growth of video games in the UK during this period was comparable to the punk subculture, fueled by young people making money from their games.

>The Spectrum was less than half the price of a Commodore 64

not proportionally less to what you received, or rather didnt receive: rubber dead fish keyboard substitute, color clash, pc speaker beeps, no joystick ports, no floppy support, less ram, abysmal hardware quality (build using defective ram, failing ferranti ulas etc)

>by the end of 1983 there were more than 450 companies selling video games on cassette compared to 95 the year before

While UK was spared from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 the market died in 1984. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron :

>Hohenberg later noted that after the 1983 Christmas season, Electron deliveries had increased to meet a demand that was no longer there, with the market having "completely dried up"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Research#Amstrad_acqu...

>1985, but this offering was postponed, ostensibly due to turmoil in the microcomputer industry, with Acorn Computers undergoing refinancing, and other companies such as Sinclair's competitor Oric and distributor Prism entering receivership.

Everything was crashing down and the only two winners were Amstrad (rock bottom prices and good grip on manufacturing cost) and Commodore (terrible management but great product).

This is true up to a point, but the spectrum was much more popular at my school than the "commie" 64,precisely because it was cheaper, and there were a lot more games available for it.

Even the spectrum was an expensive item for a single parent family in the early 80s. I have no idea how my mum afforded to get me one, but she did, and I'm thankful for it to this day as while I'm not a full time programmer, computer skills I gained programming my spectrum left me in good standing for my entire working life in multiple areas.

The BBC Micro and Acorn Archimedes were very sophisticated -- with the Archimedes being lauded as more powerful than the Amiga.

The ZX Spectrum was garbage in comparison with some of these other machines, but it was much, much cheaper, and enabled British people in lower income brackets to get involved with computing at home than would otherwise have been able to. There's a vibe to the Spectrum scene that's as British as meat pie and Queen Elizabeth -- of doing a lot with a little, and of being able to obtain cheap games for your cheap computer, or even write your own, that look grotty compared to the posh kids' computers but are still fun.

I don't think "garbage" is appropriate. Yes, the spectrum definitely didn't have the expandability or build quality of the BBC, but the only people who cared about that at my school were those who owned BBC Micros (one of which was a good friend at school). Most of us were happy with our cheap speccies because they meant we were able to have computers, play games and write software.

Don't get me wrong, there was no comparison in the hardware - the keyboard was poor, there was next to no expansion capacity compared to the BBC, and there wasn't the graphics or sound quality. But it didn't matter for the most part, and while the BBC had some quality games (Acornsoft's versions of arcade games and Frak! spring to mind), the games we cared about were as good on the spectrum if not better (Manic Miner springs to mind). No-one talked about the issues in the way they do now. Only the kids with C64s and BBCs cared about the colour clash issue with the spectrum's colour attributes. It's clearly visible in games like Jet Pac, but no-one cared. We were living the dream, and there's a reason why I've got a spectrum in the house to this day!

Compared to other systems of its era, the ZX Spectrum is positively rinky-dink. But that quality is part of its charm, its low price enabled a scene to flourish, and that scene that emerged around it embellished that charm. That's what I was getting at.

> British people in lower income brackets to get involved with computing at home

Both my parents had good well above averagely paid jobs and we still had a Spectrum

Never used Acorn Archimedes then, I take it. Are you familiar with the origins of ARM? I was enjoying 32bit computing in 1988 (even if I was only 7).

Yes I was using the Arch back in 1988 also but it was too expensive. The Amiga 500 wiped the floor with it.

3.5x faster CPU than the C64, which showed in any 3D game, a way better BASIC graphics programming experience, almost all of the same games - with caveats of gaudy colour and shit sound. For half the price of a C64, it wasn't "poor".

Nitpick: you really can't compare Z80 vs 6502 performance by looking at the clock frequency - and that comes from a Z80 fan ;)

Z80 instructions take, on average, about 3 times more clock cycles to execute compared to the 6502 so a 3.5 Mhz Z80 and a 1 MHz 6502 are about the same speed.

I see this repeated often, but if you load any 3D game side-by-side on C64 vs Spectrum, the Spectrum is significantly faster. I don't know why, but can only guess there must be optimisations availing more of the Z80's Mhz vs the 6502's.

See the stack overflow answer in my sibling comment - there's a bunch of reasons. One is that the Z80 has a bunch more registers than the 6502, another is that the famed fractional cycle times of the 6502 compared to the z80 are based on highly synthetic benchmarks / cherry picked individual instruction comparisons rather than real world use cases.

Is Elite an ok comparison for you? Its ~6fps on C64 and ~8fps on Spectrum. Technically you are correct, Spectrum is whole 25% faster. Practically both are borderline playable.

It's a rough estimate based on clock cycles. The Z80 instructions take between 4 and 23 cycles to execute, with an average of about 13 cycles. The 6502 instructions take between 2 and 7 cycles with an average of about 4, thus the difference of about 13 / 4 = 3 times more cycles. It doesn't take into account how much is being done by each instruction or memory timing, etc.

Another reason the 6502 is faster is it was designed to utilize the bus on every other clock cycle, leaving the other cycles for a co-processor such as a video chip to read memory without impacting the speed of the processor. The C64 (1 MHz w/2 MHz RAM) and BBC Micro (2 MHz w/4 MHz RAM) both used this feature. The Atari 800 didn't and lost from 10% to 47% of its processor cycles to the video chip.

The Z80 also has more addressing modes, which speed things up. It depends on what type of computing you are doing. For most games, the 6502 @ 1 MHz is faster than the Z80 @ 3 MHz, but at maths, the Z80 is faster.

This gets repeated a lot by C64 fan boys and yet solid fill 3d games were playable on the Spectrum and not on the C64 because the C64 processor was dog slow.

Weird. It's almost like people have taken an extreme edge case example and tried to extrapolate it to the general or real world case.

Real world performance pegs a 6502 as the equivalent of a Z80A running at twice the speed, not 3.5 times.

For reference: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5748/comp...

Note that none of the machines in this article are actually PCs or PC-compatible. They are what europe wrongfully called "micro-computers", but not PC or PC-compatibles.

Why wrongfully? Is there something wrong with the term "micro-computer" that I'm not aware of?

I don't see any problem with it either, my understanding was that the following weight classes existed around (and slightly before) that time:

Mainframes = room sized montrosities

Minicomputers = multi-cupboard units

Superminicomputers = just one cupboard or small fridge

Microcomputers or personal computers = these guys in the article

I don't see an issue either. Micros aren't just C64s and Spectrums. It's everything below a mini. An early IBM PC was a shadow of the class dominating supercomputers they are today.

The closest to PC's as we know them now (in that they actually ran MS-DOS) would have been Apricot's range of machines.

The Apricot PC ('83), Apricot PC Xi ('84), and Apricot XEN ('85).

I actually used the XEN at the time, since a relative had one.

However these were not IBM compatible, in that they used different support chips, and had different memory maps.

The Apricot XEN-i ('86) actually was IBM PC compatible.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_Computers

And of course the Amstrad PCs which were hugely popular over here (until the hard disk disaster). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512 They were only mostly PC compatible with a few rough edges, eg proprietary mouse and keyboard, PSU integrated into the monitor (oh Amstrad!) They were all exceptionally cheap compared to similar american PCs of the time.

If they aren't PCs, and aren't correctly called microcomputers, what are these?

They called themselves PCs at the time. The term existed before IBM-PC became a defacto standard.

Agreed. One is the Amstrad CPC, which literally stood for Colour Personal Computer.

PC is only synonymous with Wintel because everything else died except the Mac, so the terms were essentially interchangeable.

If they aren’t PCs, and they aren’t microcomputers, then what should they be called?

In Germany they were usually called what translates to "home computer".

Sure, but that was the “microcomputer” of the time. Room-sized main-frames were the computers, the file-cabinet sized PDP-8 was a mini-computer, and something that could fit on your desk was therefore the next size down, the micro-computer.

This was around when the most portable computer was not known as a “laptop” but a “luggable” due to its mini-fridge-like nature.

PC = personal computer

Since it is so personal, the iPhone should probably be named PC above any other device.

I'd consider it valid to think of "PC" as being "Personal Computer" when it's a home machine (too unwieldy to wander around outdoors with), and "PC" maybe = "Portable Computer" or "Pocket Computer" when dealing with the average smartphone, tablet, laptop, netbook, e-reader, etc, since they're all computers. Definitely don't mean "Windows" computer though. Where's the letter "P" in "Windows"?

? Micro-computer was used in North America too. And before the IBM PC and IBM PC compatible clones took over the market it wasn't uncommon for personal computers to be called PCs either.

"Microcomputers" (or "micros" in the magazines of the era) is a fine term for these machines. It distinguished these affordable home/school/small business machines from professional workstations, minicomputers, and mainframes that were larger and orders of magnitude more expensive. I had an Amstrad CPC at home and used BBC Micros (hey, it's even in the name!) at school. My friends had ZX Spectrums, Acorn Electrons, and the occasional rare MSX or C64.

The only not-really-an-exception exception in the article would be the 32-bit Acorn Archimedes; it was generations ahead of the other (8-bit) machines listed, and "microcomputer" is really associated more with the 8-bit machines in my mind, but I think that's because by the time I encountered 16/32-bit machines (Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, 386-based PCs, the Archimedes) in the early 90s, the term "microcomputer" was falling rapidly out of fashion. Those more powerful (and expensive) machines actually launched in the mid-80s and were absolutely still microcomputers in the parlance of the day.

Saying "microcomputer" (we didn't use a hyphen) is wrong is incredibly arrogant.

They're computers based on microprocessors. Hence, microcomputer. We often called them "micros" for short. Many Brits still do.

I know that "PC" now means "capable of running Windows", but back in the 80s and early 90s it usually meant more literally "personal computer", which was a synonym for "a computer small enough to fit on your desk".

A "PC" capable of running (Microsoft) Windows is also capable of running a wide variety of other operating systems as well. Despite what some would like to believe, Microsoft compatibility does not define what a personal computer is, even today. The PC is the machine, Windows is just software running on the machine.

I think you're confusing a Personal Computer with an IBM PC compatible.

Three of the seven on the list were unsuccessful and quickly disappeared (Dragon 32 almost immediately; Electron and Archimedes less so). No argument on the commercial and historical importance of ZX81, Spectrum, BBC Micro, and Amstrad CPC646, but to have to fill out a list of "key British PCs of the 1980s" with three dogs is kind of sad. Might as well get to 12 with Oric, Camputer Lynx, Grundy NewBrain, Z88, and SAM Coupé, amirite?

(Yes, yes, I know about Archimedes having an ARM CPU and such.)

And sys_64738 is correct; Spectrum is garbage and ZX81 is even more garbage. One can, as I do, acknowledge the astounding breakthroughs of something like 1K ZX Chess and The Lords of Midnight and 3D Monster Maze while still stating that they are amazing despite (or because) the hardware they run on is so terrible, especially when considering that Commodore 64 was only slightly more expensive.

>Spectrum is garbage and ZX81 is even more garbage... especially when considering that Commodore 64 was only slightly more expensive.

Jack Tramiel (owner of Commodore) was hugely influenced by what Sinclair was doing (really cheap computers). It definitely influenced the VIC20. You can't underestimate how widespread their influence is/was. Source: Commodore: A Company on the Edge.

Sort of like the Velvet Underground quip about only 20 people seeing the band live at one point, but every single one of the viewers starting their own band as a result.

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