An American perspective on the late great Sir Clive Sinclair, from Fast Company

On Mon, Sep 27, 2021 at 01:14:54PM -0700, Yeechang Lee via cctech wrote: [...] I went and looked up the numbers. A 1983 Fiat Panda was ?3k (list). At the same time, the C64 was selling for ?345. So it's an order-of-magnitude out, but still a formidable sum of money: a factory-new rustbucket (e.g. Renault Duster) is about ?10k today and I wouldn't willingly drop ?1k on a machine with similar deficiencies to the C64. Any Brit lucky enough to have ?345 burning a hole in their pocket in 1983 would have more likely gotten a BBC Micro for ?399. The Beeb had less memory and the graphics and sound were less useful for games, but it had a faster CPU (2MHz uncontended), much better BASIC, higher-resolution graphics, and was generally a rather more well-rounded and serious machine. Once you were doing useful things on the Beeb, a dual disk drive and decent monitor would beckon, at which point the price quickly creeps upwards to that of a second-hand car.