Most popular machine in the UK in the 1980's

[RPC_GAMES]

HI Guys, I've watched a few documentaries on Acorn computers and Sinclair computers ZX Spectrum, +2 etc and I was wondering which one was more popular in the 1980's in the UK.
Did Acorn Archimedes machines outsell Spectrum machines?

Here in Australia in the 1980's it was mostly Atari 800XL, Commodore 64 & Apple IIe's.

So who actually dominated the home computer market in the 1980's in the UK, Acorn or Sinclair or was it some other brand?

Pete 

[AmigaJay]

Sinclair Spectrum easily in the UK, the C64 was too expensive, whist the CPC sold pretty well here too, Atari and Apple and MSX machines had limited success due to being expensive, it was basically the cheaper the machine the more chance of success!

[RPC_GAMES]

Hi AmigaJay, wow that's surprising. I would have thought due to the Acorn BBC model B in schools in the UK that
the Acorn machines would of dominated the UK market. Kids programmed them at school so I would have thought
that kids or parents would have bought them for home use as well but as you said, price always wins.

Did you think the Acorn computers were too over priced for the power of the machines?
e.g. video modes, graphics, colours, sound and Ram?

The Atari800XL was a lot more expensive than the C64 here in Aussie land. Probably due to the 256 colours, multiple graphics modes, 4 sound channels and faster floppy disk drive. Again your right, Price wins.

Pete 

[WiggyDiggyPoo]

The CPC range and its successor the PCW range did very well for what they were.

As late as '96 we were still using PCW green screen computers in our business studies class.

AFAIK Acorn despite the BBC gig just weren't as good as Sinclair for marketing and the public/games companies never took to them.

Atari/Amiga had the great 16bit war of course which Commodore may have won but they then lost all their market share to the next generation of consoles and the flurry of cheap PCs that started appearing.

Does anyone know of a definitive guide to computing in the UK in the 80s/90s before the PC started dominating?

[AmigaJay]

The Amiga died due to Commodore being crap...that along with consoles being very popular in the UK, rather than losing to PCS, PCS were still too expensive (the cheapest being Amstrads 25mhz 386 was £1000 in xmas 1993 though was slated for not being powerful enough to run Doom full screen etc) have a big gaming market share until around 1997 with 3d cards 3dfx etc started emerging.

[WiggyDiggyPoo]

I dunno, certainly in my computer club the 20+ amigas and Atari's gradually disappeared towards the mid 90s as most people graduated onto a PC

[Antiriad2097]

In the mid 90s, many computer gamers finally made the jump to consoles. I'd already picked up Mega Drive and SNES in the early part of the decade, as well as Gameboy and Game Gear, but those ran alongside my old Atari ST as games were expensive and blank discs were not.

With a half decent PC still costing a thousand quid, I had a Playstation a couple of years before my first PC in 1998.

It all came down to cost.

[Greyfox]

Well over in Ireland, up until 1990 through to 1995 we'll say, the Atari ST I felt was no longer the machine of choice as this point and was been surpassed my other platforms we had the Megadrive and Super Nes looming to take over your gaming needs and at least the Amiga was at the time sorta the only computer platform that hold its own fight regarding its games and pricing versus the Megadrive at least plus extras

Although I had a Snes in 1993, it was a games machine and my Amiga was for doing all the serious stuff which itself faded for me in 1995 as the Amiga was becoming stale and dated (which is a huge regret) but at least it kept up with times unlike Atari's Platforms, and although the Atari Falcon030 was seriously powerful machine to combat Commodores a3000/a4000 range, it was too late for 16-32 bit machines(computers) just at the turn of the arrival of the Sony Playstation. PC's didn't come into the equation for me till 1996, which I build myself for a mere 350 quid at the time, Pentium 3 mmx with I think 512k of ram and a 500meg hard drive and an Ati graphics card with tv out and a soundblaster 16 soundcard lol.. So I think my timing was just right for progression.

PC was used for serious stuff like music, publishing and whatever windows 95 could offer, played a great few Fps on it, but always returned to the Snes for my mode7 games and the likes and the Playstation to play the next gen stuff, the PC wasn't doing. Although it did have some great FMV games like 7th guest andd many others etc. but I think I managed to be cost effective throughout the late 1980s and 1990s regarding pricing of next generation hardware more so than others at the time.

[AmigaJay]

Exactly, many Amiga and Megadrive owners jumped to the Playstation, again until around 1997 and 3dfx there was really nothing on the PC that the PSX couldnt do, and said price was a big reason.
We got our first PC in 1997 and my dad wanted one and is quite tight with money, and he still spend £1200 for one with a printer, which was the cheapest in its range, so even by 1997 the prices were still high.

[WiggyDiggyPoo]

To be fair the graphic card war on the PC is a whole different story, but certainly I was enjoying the mid 90s FPS/RTS on 486/Pentium 1s which were outdoing the dying Amiga scene.

Don't get me wrong as I agree in terms of cost it was 16bit comp<PSX<PC.

There's a very good article on the web somewhere, written by Stuart Campbell, highlighting as early as '91/'92 games companies didn't view the 16 bit comps as a viable format with a future. I'll try and track it down later but his site has gone through quite an overhall since I last read it.

PS it might be on AP2

[AmigaJay]

Not being funny but i wouldnt trust Stuart Campbells articles as much as his reviews, plus he killed off Cannon Fodder 2 with his stupid designs imo so i dont have much liking for the guy lol

Plus the fact 16bit comps had more publishers than consoles, so that pretty much says it all about SC!

[RPC_GAMES]

Thanks guys for your input. I too in the 1990's had a PC along side my Amiga500 and Atari 1040ST. It was a 486DX4 100Mhz, 512kRam, Voodoo FX video card, Soundblaster 32(I'm a musician as well) , cdrom and SVGA 1024x768 crt monitor. Doom, Quake, Wolf3D and other 3D games ran smooth (after memmaker made free mem for them to run. Stupid 640k base memory. Grrrr). Yes I totally went sick on the PC's 3D games due to the Amiga and Atari being too slow (8Mhz) for 3D games but eventually got sick of 3D games and went back to the 16bit machines.

So during the 1980's the ZX Spectrum was the THING in the UK and in the 1990's I guess the Playstation One took over. But why the PS1? You could only play games on it and not create your own programs and games. I guess you guys still had your PC's, Amiga's and ST's to do programming and be creative.
 
Thanks again guys for your input.

Pete 

[WiggyDiggyPoo]

Programming and creativity I was pretty terrible to be honest,  I had a bash using SEUCK but never progressed into the two main Amiga beginner languages BlitzBasic/Amos. I did use DPaint and Octamed a fair bit but but talent was woefully lacking.

It was always the games that drove me so hence the move to PSX for gaming and PC for my work stuff (although when Half Life hit that blew me away).

[dot.fyre]

Hi AmigaJay, wow that's surprising. I would have thought due to the Acorn BBC model B in schools in the UK that
the Acorn machines would of dominated the UK market. Kids programmed them at school so I would have thought
that kids or parents would have bought them for home use as well but as you said, price always wins.

I studied computing on the ZX spectrum at high school. The school did have BBC B's (didn't they all?) but they did a poll on who had what computer then replaced the bbc's with the most popular.
The whole subject was then re-written around the spectrum.
And I thank whoever came up with the idea, as the previous years of typing in programs and learning to fix them helped me pass my exam with flying colours. 

[WiggyDiggyPoo]

We still used BBC micros in the 90s for my electronics class, used to control simple circuits and LEGO robots with them.

Was there a language called LOGO, rings a bell a little?