On Tue, 28 Sept 2021 at 22:05, Peter Corlett via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > 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.
I thank my learnéd friend for the correction. OK, not a new car -- a 2nd hand, used, car. So, as Fred says, around 1980, the early all-in-one ready-to-use machines like the PET & TRS-80 were the cost of a used car in the States. £-for-$ they cost around _three times_ as much in the UK. A few years later, the much cheaper 2nd-generation home computers from Commodore and Atari were *still* in the ballpark of the cost of a cheap used car in the UK, and easily as much if you added a disk drive... while a Sinclair was about a third of the price, and even with the (crappy but *much* better than audio cassettes!) ZX Microdrive and the interface/controller, were _still_ around the price of a standalone C64. Whereas, as Peter says and I agree, if you were hobbyist and not a gamer, a BBC Micro was a more attractive buy -- capable of 80-column text, hi-res mono graphics, and with an excellent, fully-structured, recursion and all, blisteringly-fast BASIC interpreter which also supported inline 6502 assembly language. And also *extremely* expandable -- not only could it have a 2nd 6502 CPU, or a Z80 and CP/M, later it could even have a NatSemi 32016 or an ARM 2nd processor. Not just able to network, use a hard disk, have additional ROMs and things, it even talked to Laserdiscs: https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=2140 Definitely preferable if you wanted a _computer_ and not games. Although it had great games, too, including the seminal Elite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JCU4Hulgcg I wanted one very much, but my family couldn't afford it... so I got a Spectrum. 2nd hand, it cost one-fifth the price of a BBC Model B. -- Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven • Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702-829-053
