30 Sep
2005
30 Sep
'05
4:34 p.m.
Zane H. Healy wrote:
As for the Acorn, did it ever get exported anywhere?
I know they never
really made it here to the US.
Quite a few models, both 8 and 32 bit (Acorn moved to 32 bit at the time
when everyone else was still making 16 bit machines) went to Australia
and New Zealand. I'm not sure about "closer to home" though in terms of
what was exported to the rest of Europe. The Acorn Atom seems to have
had reasonable success in Holland in the form of the Prophet 2.
Far as I know, only the Acorn BBC B ever made it to the US though
(http://www.nostalgia8.nl/banks/machinelst.htm is a good place to go for
an idea of how many Acorn machines *other* than the familiar BBC B were
made). I believe the only reason it wasn't successful in the US was
down to the following that the Apple 2 had, rather than there being any
direct competition in terms of technical merit, performance, available
software etc. (it was a fantastic machine, just rather expensive for
home users where the educational discounts weren't available)
Another good example would be the
Sinclair, except for the little Timex-Sinclair system that was out at
about the same time as the VIC-20, or a little before, I don't think any
Sinclair models made it to the US (I have one, but it came from a list
member a few years ago).
Didn't the ZX81 and the Spectrum make it to the US (both in the form of
Timex-badged machines, model numbers of which I forget). You're right
though, far as I know the Spectrum +, Spectrum 128, +2, +2A, +3, and the
QL were never sold in the States.
I'm trying to think of other (reasonably) widespread (within the UK)
UK-built machines of the time. I don't think the Dragon machines ever
made it out to the US, nor did the Jupiter Ace, or any of Research
Machines stuff.
As I remember it, pretty much all the home computers owned by people in
the UK were either the Sinclair Spectrum, C64, or the BBC B. Later on,
people moved to either the Atari ST or the Amiga (Macs and PCs were far
too expensive here to justify purchase).
On the business scene, both Macs and Amiga hardware did well in the DTP
/ broadcast industries I suppose, whilst PCs ruled in the larger
companies. Smaller businesses were certainly happy doing their accounts
and the like on some of the smaller micros though - maybe that's less
true of the US?
I remember the train timetable / announcement systems still using BBC
micros in the UK up until 5 years or so ago, and AFAIK the same was true
in some areas of the telephone industry. Perhaps there was more of an
attitude of "if it does the job, use it" in the UK compared to the US
(where I get the impression that the philosophy was that you're nothing
unless you have a Mac or a PC)
cheers
Jules