Early home computer use in the UK and differences in the USA?

[joydivision]

I know it started with the Sinclar ZX series, the VIC20 and of course the C64 and Spectrum which really kicked things off in the UK.

In the USA the Apple II, Tandy TRS, and Commodore Pet had come popular by the late 70's but in the UK the only microcomputer we had was the Acorn Atom.

My dad used to run libraries and he said he noticed around 1980 a lot of people were coming in asking for computer books. He did not buy a computer for himself until 1984 (a C64). He bought it for games and for programming the SID chip via BASIC. This was not an easy task as BASIC did not support any sound commands, you had to use peak and poke to program the SID chip.

The first C64 blew up in about 1987 and we didn't get a new one until 1990, this time a C64C.

By this time the Amiga was really what most people were using in homes in the UK, or an Amstrad if you were doing serious business stuff. I gather in the USA by 1990 the IBM clones were already popular in homes?

In early 1993 I had a decision to make, my parents had a budget of £1000 to buy a new computer and it was up to me to decide what to get. So I set my heart on a new Amiga 1200, however by the time I added the monitor, printer and hard drive the cost was approaching the PC. My cousins had just bought a brand new IBM PS/1 with Windows 3.0 and as soon as I used it I realised it was quite a bit better than the Amiga we ended up buying an IBM 386, 80MB HD and a massive 2MB of RAM.

I would soon regret that decision when I realised most games needed at least 4MB of RAM to play. To me mind it was 1993 when the UK and USA market became the same. For some reason in the UK we were happy with our C64s for around ten years but I think this was because not much else apart from the Atari ST and Amigas were released and it wasn't until the SNES etc came along that it became very out dated.

But I suppose my question is, were many computers been used in at home in the UK before the Vic20 and ZX81 etc? The reason I find this quite interesting is that the UK had the second biggest market in the world for home computers, yet in the late 80's the market the UK seemed to pretty much belong to Commodore but in the USA things were very different.

This thread is purely about home use btw, I realise IBM and the clones were very popular in the UK for business use from the mid 80's onwards but not in homes.

 

[SAG]

Started with an abacus. I had the Hail Caesar model 101. Was a modular bad boy that used catgut... at least you could replace the calculus though, which is more than could be said for the Utu model that my friend used.

Once the frame broke and the local shop didn't have any replacements (no internet those days, had to rely on the brick-and-mortar/dung-and-straw shops) I decided it was time to upgrade to something better. So I got a pascaline.

By this time the Step Reckoner was hitting main stream. There were rumors that a steamed powered version was due to hit the market but by that time the war of the Quadruple Alliance was in full force and things got toned back a bit for personal fluff items like this - had to support the war effort you know!

Things now-a-days are completely different, what with disposable this and disposable that... buy something and toss it out for a new one. I miss the good ol' days when things were meant to last.

 

[SAG]

Oh Yeah ? You were lucky.

I wanted to have one of those funky Antikythera mechanisms but was so poor I had to make it out of those cheap Le Go bricks from Gaul. Fortunately someone had a camcorder handy... http://makezine.com/2010/12/10/lego-antikythera-mechanism/

The Real Thing here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqhuAnySPZ0

Think you were poor?
If I weren't born a boy, I'd have had nothing to play with!

Seriously though, thanks for the links. That's some pretty cool stuff.

 

[JustInspired]

Started with an abacus. I had the Hail Caesar model 101. Was a modular bad boy that used catgut... at least you could replace the calculus though, which is more than could be said for the Utu model that my friend used.

Once the frame broke and the local shop didn't have any replacements (no internet those days, had to rely on the brick-and-mortar/dung-and-straw shops) I decided it was time to upgrade to something better. So I got a pascaline.

By this time the Step Reckoner was hitting main stream. There were rumors that a steamed powered version was due to hit the market but by that time the war of the Quadruple Alliance was in full force and things got toned back a bit for personal fluff items like this - had to support the war effort you know!

Things now-a-days are completely different, what with disposable this and disposable that... buy something and toss it out for a new one. I miss the good ol' days when things were meant to last.

ROFL.

Thanks for the laughs.

 

[bertie40]

Pah !
My first device was the "SLATE 10".
I think this can officially be classed as the first tablet, although it was only available in monochrome. (grey, actually).

This was an offshoot from one of the original 10 tablets, first used by an Israeli tech by the name of Moses.

These particular tablets, known locally as "sinai" had to be treated and handled very carefully.

Booting them was often a problem, so the only way to "Mount Sinai" (sorry) was to use a cartridge, known as a donkey.
Even so, these delicate slates often fell pray to being dropped, with the data getting heavily fragmented.

Defragmentation, in the form of a rich glue, was often used in an attempt to make the slate readable again.

References to this are recorded in the very first Hackers Bible.

Also, it could be said that this was one of the first WORM drives (write once, read many). Data could be written easily enough, but scrubbing the thing was a bitch.

 

[MobileTechie]

I had a ZX80 and I was the first person in the school to have a computer. They made me bring it in so they could show it in assembly.

Later the school bought a PET32 which was very cool and the head let me use it loads. I remember using the poke command write to the screen memory so make things move on the screen.

After that is was ZX81, ZX spectrum, Dragon32 (mistake) then C64 which was the best computer ever. Learned to write assembly language on it. Wish I still had the same brain power to be honest!

 

[joydivision]

I regret never been to able to much with the C64 other than some very basic demos written in BASIC. I did do stuff in QBASIC and GWBASIC on the PC but by the time I was old enough to write proper applications I was using Pentium class machines.

In around 2000 I got into Blitzbasic and made quite a few games with that but want to buy Basic4Android so I can make some games for that. I can do C and Java but Java is quite frustrating especially for Android. C#.net is a lovely development tool and used to play about with it a lot but I find exe files are just too large and you also need .NET installed.

I really wish I had got into Blitz during the Amiga days but I was just too young.

For now though I need to finish of my mini PHP CMS project