An American perspective on the late great Sir Clive Sinclair, from Fast Company

[Peter Corlett]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2021 at 01:14:54PM -0700, Yeechang Lee via cctech wrote:
> Liam Proven says:
[...]
>> If you were going to spend as much as a new car on an early home
>> computer,
> If you're going to exaggerate for effect, don't exaggerate so much that
> your meaning is lost.

I went and looked up the numbers. A 1983 Fiat Panda was £3k (list). At the
same time, the C64 was selling for £345. So it's an order-of-magnitude out,
but still a formidable sum of money: a factory-new rustbucket (e.g. Renault
Duster) is about €10k today and I wouldn't willingly drop €1k on a machine
with similar deficiencies to the C64.

Any Brit lucky enough to have £345 burning a hole in their pocket in 1983
would have more likely gotten a BBC Micro for £399. The Beeb had less memory
and the graphics and sound were less useful for games, but it had a faster
CPU (2MHz uncontended), much better BASIC, higher-resolution graphics, and
was generally a rather more well-rounded and serious machine.

Once you were doing useful things on the Beeb, a dual disk drive and decent
monitor would beckon, at which point the price quickly creeps upwards to
that of a second-hand car.