26 Apr
2018
26 Apr
'18
10:26 a.m.
On 26 Apr 2018, at 13:47, Liam Proven via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I think if you ask virtually any British person in their late 30s, 40s or
50s, in anything connected with IT, what their first computer was, the
answer would be a ZX 81 or a ZX Spectrum. It was the single range of
machines that drove the entire computer revolution over here, and also in
the form of a myriad clones in the Communist Bloc.
My first was a ZX80 which my Dad borrowed from my physics teacher at school. That spurred
me on to get my own ZX81 which had just come out, then the Research Machines 380Z at later
school, then the 48K ZXSpectrum. Amazing little machines for the money but I never
discovered the name of the designer until much later.
Later, imitators came along -- the Oric (6502) and
Dragon (6809) ranges,
for instance. And of course there were many machines that aspired to be
better: Memotech. Camputers Lynx, Elan Enterprise, etc. All flopped to some
degree.
You could?ve stopped after ?flopped? though the Oric went on to do very well in France and
the Dragon still has a good userbase today. Strictly speaking they all do apart from the
Lynx, but the Dragon is alive and well. The biggest Enterprise group is still in Hungary
where the unsold machines were dumped after Enterprise Computers went bust in 1986.
And that was down to Rick Dickinson, who only
discovered years later how he
had inspired whole generations of people.
Yep. RIP. I missed him doing ?an evening with?? last year at the Computer Museum in
Cambridge, naturally I thought there?d be another one.
--
adrian/witchy
Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest home computer collection?
t: @binarydinosaurs f: facebook.com/binarydinosaurs
w: www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk