On 9 April 2013 21:00, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
On Tue, 9 Apr 2013, Jason McBrien wrote:
Remove the ZX81, whose keyboard disqualifies it
from any list of best
anything.
That's just a decorative PICTURE of a keyboard.
Like "serving suggestion" on a box of cereal.
It also provides some protection against scraping
up the bottom of the door that it is used with.
If you are going to do anything that involves input,
then you would need to connect an actual keyboard.
I once sold a ragged old disk pack at a computer swap. One
that had seen a lot of use being passed around a classroom.
My assistant stuck a Timex between the platters, and changed
the sign to read "Mass storage for Sinclairs. Holds four."
I don't know from "sexiest", but it was the funniest computer of its time.
Hey, you, get off Sir Clive and the beloved ZX boxen! I still own at
least 2 Spectrum 128s and any year now I will dig them out and get
them working again.
The thing about the ZX81 is something that you chaps over in the
Colonies might miss.
The were affordable.
Britain in 1981 was *poor*. Not Developing World poor, but poor.
The Apple II cost about 4 or 5 months' salary for the average
professional man. That is excluding floppy drives and a monitor - add
them and you were talking in the region of a years' salary.
Only the wealthy could afford an exotic expensive toy like one of
those for home use. If you had the money and any taste, you'd probably
buy a used Ferrari instead, frankly.
Compare with the Harley-Davidson: a solid bike in the US; a vastly
expensive exotic import here; one of them, new, costs about as much as
/two/ vastly-better-specified Japanese bikes. Three or four really
nice bikes if you are prepared to buy used machines - whereas used
Harleys here cost only slightly less than new ones.
My 160mph+ 147bhp Kawasaki ZZR-1100 cost me ?4000, 2nd owner, 4500
miles on the clock, immaculate condition and a custom paint job. (!ZX
11 Ninja" in the US. As featured in Babylon 5. The fastest bike in the
world when I bought mine.)
A basic HD cruiser, no extras, would be about ?13,000-?14,000 at the
same time. I literally could have bought a Kawasaki *and* a Honda
*and* a Yamaha *and* a Suzuki for the same money and had a whole
stable.
The Vic-20 was about ?300 - ?400. The C64, when it appeared, was more.
?500 or so in the early days, I think.
The ZX81 was ?100. About a tenth or a fifteenth the cost of an Apple
II - the main competition of the time.
Yes, sure, an Acorn Atom was a vastly better 8-bit machine at the
time, but they were really expensive, too - 3 or 4 times the price, I
think.
The ZX81 was built down to a price. No sound, no colour, no graphics,
but a complete functional computer that you could use and learn BASIC
on. You could load and save your work and it was an actual computer
that you could *own* for yourself for a couple of weeks' pay.
American equivalents ranged from the cost of a foreign holiday for a
whole family to the price of an extension on your house, or a quite
nice car.
And it actually looked smart and modern and distinctive and different,
even then, from all the beige boxes.
--
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