ZX81 killers (was: Microsoft open sources GWBASIC)

Jim Brain wrote on Thu, 28 May 2020 18:15:19 -0500 There were ZX81 ads in Byte magazine before the Timex thing. I bought one (Brazil is 60Hz so it had to be an American version) as a major upgrade to my MEK6800D2, but then replaced it with a TI99/4A. The threat of the ZX81 (and a bit more distantly the Spectrum) in the US lead to machines such as the TRS-80 MC10, TI99/2 and Commmodore C116 to try to compete with it. Then the video game crash happened which killed this market. In the UK this nearly happened a little later as well, but Sinclair was saved by Alan Sugar and Acorn by Olivetti while all other companies were less lucky. Acording to Gordon Bell's theory of computer classes this shouldn't have happened. Once introduced, the $100 computer should have remained a viable class from the ZX80 to eventually the OLPC and then the Raspberry Pi. My own theory is that the lack of a suitable storage device for this class made it a passing fad in the 1980s. That would only change when 3.5" floppy drives dropped from over $100 to about $10 in the very late 1990s (though nobody took advantage of that), but specially when we got pen drives and SD cards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_law_of_computer_classes I think that the ZX81 class computers arrived later in the US and were gone sooner. In the UK and other places they were around much longer. Like a TV series that gets cancelled before the first episode airs, they never even got a chance to be rejected by the American public. -- Jecel