By Andy McCue, 3 September 2008 15:26
Sinclair ZX81
At the same time as the BBC Microcomputer's debut, along came the Sinclair ZX81, which could be hooked up to a TV set with programmes and games loaded using an audio cassette recorder.
The key thing about the ZX81 was its price - a mere £70.
The National Museum of Computing's Chilvers said: "Another aspect of British computing is computing that is cheap and available to everyone. It allowed a computer to be produced for under £100 so many more people could buy the machine and develop their computing skills and develop computing as a quality British industry."
Photo credit: Andy McCue/silicon.com
Comments
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1. John Dixon
I went all nostalgic with the Commodore PET. Of course that was the good old days without all this easy off-the-shelf applications. Back then if you wanted a work processor, you wrote it yourself - although you obviously had to take time out every half hour or so to shovel coal into the back.
Good days, good days...
2. Richard Sarson
Wot no ICL One per desk, alias BT Tonto?
A magnificent machine. I've still got one if Bletchley want it.
3. Lionel A Smith
Picture 6 is of an Acorn A3020 and not an Acorn RISC PC as such which had a variable number of main case slices (the one I have here has two slices with two internal hardrives fitted - one a SCSI) and a separate keyboard.
Sure the A3020 is based on the ARM RISC chipset but is only one of a number of such computers which began, in 1987, with the A310 (1MB RAM) and A305 (512KB RAM) with separate keyboards and running the 'Arthur' OS. RISC OS came later as RISC OS 2 , C 1989, which had a rich featured WIMP interface and excellent vector drawing (DRAW) and pixel based (PAINT) graphics software in the OS ROMS.
RISC OS 2 introduced a high standard of text antialiasing not seen on Windows before 95 and even then RISC OS was better.