On Mon, 27 Sept 2021 at 03:44, Bill Degnan <billdeg...@gmail.com> wrote: > > My girlfriend commented to me that Americans don't understand London"s Fleet > Street scene of the 70's and early 80s and how Sinclair products were > represented there. In the US the "Timex Sinclair TS-1000" was a budget $99 > computer for sale in Hallmark gift stores and its marketing represented > little of the fleet Street cache.
I can't say -- my first visit to the USA was in about 1997 or so. I know that Sinclair computers were _so_ cheap that in the USA they were perceived as toys, not worthy of any serious consideration. USAnians in my experience tend to not consider the flipside of that: in Europe, even the cheapest of American computers were all vastly expensive and only very rich people had them. *Because* they were so very expensive, what in the home markets were perceived as minor flaws -- such as the C64's awful BASIC -- were deal-breakers. If you were going to spend as much as a new car on an early home computer, then you wanted something well-rounded: decent graphics, decent sound, a decent BASIC, a usable keyboard, and maybe mass storage that didn't cost as much as 2 extra cars. Therefore things like the C64 were not appealing: terrible BASIC, terribly slow disk drives which were _also_ terribly expensive. Or the Atari 400, which had good graphics and a passable BASIC but a terrible keyboard. We didn't choose things like the ZX-81 or ZX Spectrum because they were AWESOME AMAZEBALLS GREAT. We chose them because we could afford them, and they had for their time a decent balance of features. The genius of Sinclair was that they managed to combine absolute-rock-bottom prices with a reasonable blend of good-enough features. Soon afterwards this was highlighted because, positioned in between the unbeatably low Sinclair price points and the desirable-but-unaffordable Commodore and Atari machines (and the impossibly expensive Tandy and Apple ones), came a raft of other machines from companies who were trying to get down to Sinclair prices but the results were unusable near-junk: • Mattel Aquarius • Sord M5 (arguably) • VTech Laser 200 etc. Pretty much only Tangerine/Oric managed to successfully compete with Sinclair at the lower end, with the Oric-1 and Oric Atmos. And a few companies who comprehensively outdid Sinclair's specifications but which resulted in uncompetitive prices. Of these, Acorn thrived for a while, had a partnership with Apple, and its offshoot ARM is now the biggest-selling CPU family in history, now used by Apple, Microsoft and Google. Amstrad briefly thrived (especially with the CPC and PCW ranges) and then brought cheap PC clones to Europe, but failed to keep up as the PC market moved to better-spec higher-end machines. Ones that failed because they cost as much as a Commodore or Atari but didn't have the range of games: • Elan Enterprise • Memotech MTX 512 • Camputers Lynx • Tatung Einstein • Dragon 32/64 I suspect that I've named 10 models of widespread 1980s home computer there that most readers in the USA will never have seen. I didn't own all of them, but I've played with every single one of them. :-) -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
