Most popular machine in the UK in the 1980's

[retromod]

For me the Sinclair products were the typical homecomputers. In germany I tried to upgrade my ZX81 (brand new at this time) for 400 DM and it was not possible as all shops were sold out of required parts. So I finally sold it and bought an Atari 2600  .

Later I bought an Archimedes A305 for about 4000 DM. It was the first computer which was unloved. At the time Apple started to influence Acorn to spin off it's CPU (later ARM) and the model was not really developed further. No customer want any project on this box so beside the technical interested facts and unbelievable speed it was a demo machine (I have had all dev and sdk's bought read to port games) only.

I sold if for about 1200DM one year later. Unused as it lacks any possibility to really use it or dev software for customers on it. All people hunted for PC ports of games. Atari ST and Amiga projects were stopped all over the places and software distributor got bankrupted finally which was the end of the homecomputer history
(from my point of view).

[WiggyDiggyPoo]

Were Amstrads not popular on Germany, albeit rebadged as Schneider?

I also read something around here somewhere about the continental market being more insistent on green screens (for business) than in the UK?

[RPC_GAMES]

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?

Hahaha YES, LOGO was a programming language used for drawing geometric shapes and patters on your monitor.
The was a Turtle in the middle of the screen acting like your mouse cursor and with commands like PD (Pen Down) FD50 (forward 50 pixels) the turtle would move up 50 pixel and draw a line. Then type RT90 (Turn right 90 deg) FD50 (forward 50 pixels) and if you repeat that 4 times you draw a square on the screen.
Now theirs a language I haven't use in over 20 years and I can still remember it. Do a search on Google for LOGO PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE. It was fun in school but that's all we used it for, drawing kaleidoscopes, circles, squares etc.

Pete 

[TrekMD]

There is even a LOGO cart for the Vectrex that works the same way!

[RPC_GAMES]

There is even a LOGO cart for the Vectrex that works the same way!

Eh? How would you type in the commands on the Vectrex?  I've never seen a keyboard for it.
is there a website I can check out?

Pete 

[TrekMD]

There is even a LOGO cart for the Vectrex that works the same way!

Eh? How would you type in the commands on the Vectrex?  I've never seen a keyboard for it.
is there a website I can check out?

Pete 

You have to select things on a menu screen.  A bit convoluted. You can check it here:  Vectorzoa.

[RPC_GAMES]

There is even a LOGO cart for the Vectrex that works the same way!

Eh? How would you type in the commands on the Vectrex?  I've never seen a keyboard for it.
is there a website I can check out?

Pete  :113:

Pete 

[WiggyDiggyPoo]

That's the one lol Everyone just drew boobs and willies hahahah

[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.  :66:

[RPC_GAMES]

That's the one lol Everyone just drew boobs and willies hahahah

 :24:  :21:

Pete 

[guest5132]

We had a version of LOGO on the old RM machines at school until mid 90s, i never got past drawing circles (my abilities never progressed to boobs and willies ), but it seems you could do a lot more with it.  Someone even had a fairly slow version of asteroids written in it.

[MadCommodore]

I think it was in the second year of ZZAP!64 circa early 1987 that it not only was outselling CVG but also Crash magazine so somewhere around 86-87 so the C64 scene had overtaken all others in the UK by 86-87. It's the cover art called ZZAP ZAPPING by Oli Frey (which was one of the 3 ZZAP!64 Tshirt designs). Before that it was the ZX rubber key models for sure due to price. Amstrad couldn't care less about sales of Plus2 Speccy as they bought the rights to kill it off to help the CPC sales hence no technical improvements unlike the CPC+ range. The PCW also had nothing in common with the CPC and was sold side by side as an off the shelf cheap word processing system (remember in mid 80s huge corporations like Abbey National were STILL using pre IBM systems of terminals running things like Wordstar over thin client architecture...no MS Word here in the UK!)

Before that I believe the biggest sellers in the UK was the ZX80/ZX81 which outsold the TI/Tandy/VIC/Oric/Jupiter ACE/Aquarius etc.

The BBC Micro was a nice machine but it was really expensive, same price as an Atari ST in 1986. I bet people don't remember the £99 Atari 800XLs that sold like hot cakes as Jack Tramiel was stock dumping acquired inventory when he bought Atari.

The ST outsold the Amiga 500 well into late 1980s, I think the 1 millionth Amiga was not sold for 5 years, but after the Amiga came down to £399 and the ST had to go back up to £399 due to the DRAM shortage costing Atari it was pretty much the end of the ST reign in the UK.

The Archimedes prior to the A3000 all in one ST/Amiga style model was hugely expensive and didn't really sell. The A3010 which went head to head with the Amiga 1200 was a really great bargain, 8 channel stereo DACs, byte per pixel planar 256 colour screens and a CPU as fast as a 20mhz 68030 in the ARM 2. Still the games were PD quality most of the time, the best arcade racing game on it is Lotus II and this is no faster or better looking than the Amiga 500 version, quality was lacking on Archimedes games so it didn't sell IMO

Pretty much then CPC/ZX/C64 and then Atari 520ST/STFM vs Amiga 500 for the UK, other machines sold far too little to really be mentioned. The BBC often shown in TV documentaries obviously had great sales to the schools/colleges but not for home use due to stupidly high price, shame because Acornsoft did some really awesome early arcade game rip-offs!

Sales of the Megadrive really hurt the Amiga, but that was down to piss poor constant ST ports from greedy UK publishers like Ocean/US Gold/Activision for games like Chase HQ/Outrun/Powerdrift. I bought a Megadrive because I'd rather pay £50 for Outrun/Afterburner on the Megadrive than £25 for the piss poor rubbish sold on Amiga. Lotus II is impossible on a SNES and yet it is the only decent arcade quality smooth and fast racer on the machine. They screwed themselves and so the era of SEGA cool high quality conversions began in the UK (after the flop of SMS and NES here thank god!)

All pretty easy to see in old CVG issues from 1980 to 1989 what was going on/popular just by looking at which machines had the most games. In early 80s you had Hunchback for ZX Speccy and C64 but also for VIC20 and Oric 1 etc by the mid 80s it was all ZX/CPC/64 and then slowly some games also got an ST version like Gauntlet 1 and Road Runner and eventually crappy ST ports for five quid more on Amiga (so crap they ran slower as the ST was 1mhz faster and no custom chips were used on Amiga ports lol)