The late, great TRS-80

On 23/06/07, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: Fair point and some good questions. For me, personally, what mattered was the first one under ?100. (At that time, in the early 1980s, under US$100 would have done as a comparison.) As far as I heard back then, Apple did the first machine for under $1000. Very nice for those rich Americans in the prosperous north or coastal states. Pure fantasy for a middle-class English kid in the Europe. That was possibly the family's net income for several months. What mattered to *me* was Clive Sinclair's computers. Machines you could actually afford. Microcomputers for the everyman. Not business machines for thousands, not even cut-down toys for the American home market or high-quality educational machines for the European market, but computers designed and made for the home, for hobbyists, where all you needed was the computer - it worked with your existing TV and cassette tape recorder - and said computer cost, say, a week or two's disposable income, so it's something you might buy for your child. For me, that meant a 48K Spectrum, bought 2nd hand from a classified ad for ?80 in about 1983. Before then, I'd learned to code on friends and family's multiple ZX81s, but that didn't do enough to interest a 13 yr old kid. No sound, no graphics, no colour. I'd used the Commodore PETs at school but there were only 4 of them between over 400 pupils - and this in an expensive, fairly exclusive, private boarding school! For a more formal definition, though, I'd say "the first personal computer" that mattered would probably be the first microprocessor-based machine, with a QWERTY keyboard and an actual VDU of some form - i.e., more than a single line of text - that ordinary customers could pay money for and receive in return. Not pre-order, but buy and receive. How or where doesn't matter. Something like the MITS Altair or 8800 or whatever was too obscure for the everyman, I think. Doesn't count. Tony, your HP sounds like the first single-unit ready-to-use desktop computer, but that's not the same thing. I bet it was appallingly expensive, and with a calculator display what it could do would be very limited - a great deal less than a 1K ZX-81, I would think...? -- Liam Proven ? Blog, homepage &c: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508