British PCs of the 1980s

M. Robert Gibson said:
An article on an American site
arstechnica.com

Egad! 7 key British PCs of the 1980s Americans might have missed

These bedrocks of the UK computer industry didn't get much love in the states.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com

I was a Dragon32 nerd
Click to expand...
We had a ZX-80. (Not a mistype, we had the one before the 81. We did not buy it though. It <cough> came from Napier College retiring some of its computer supplies.)

Then I got a speccy.

The thing is, I wouldn't call it a PC. It's more a very primitive games console - at least that's what it was mainly used for ;)
 
Venusian Broon said:
We had a ZX-80. (Not a mistype, we had the one before the 81. We did not buy it though. It <cough> came from Napier College retiring some of its computer supplies.)

Then I got a speccy.

The thing is, I wouldn't call it a PC. It's more a very primitive games console - at least that's what it was mainly used for ;)
Click to expand...

Ive heard of the Sinclair . :)
 
In those days , yes. PCs were IBM machines, and eventually their clones, like AMSTRAD PCs.
Sinclairs, Commodores, BBC Bs etc were known as home computers.
The main difference between them was an IBM PC was sold for business rather than home use, and it ran off a hard drive rather than off a tape, as did most of the home computers of the time.
It was running DOS as an operating system (Disk Operating System) rather than a TOS (Tape Operating System), as did most of the Home computers. Most of the home computers eventually moved up to using floppy discs when they became cheaper, but still using a modified TOS. The floppy disks were of course really floppy, generally 5 1/4 inch discs. (When they got improved into the more well known 3 1/2 inch disks in a hard case, they were still called floppy disks because Hard Disk was already taken.)
The IBM hard disks, initially having a colossal capacity of 20Mb weighed a ton (not literally), an d were quite fragile.

Another thing to note. Bill Gates bought the rights to IBM DOS 6 for his new company Microsoft, which he renamed Microsoft DOS 6.1, and the rest is history.

It's also maybe a bit cheeky having both the Acorn Electron and the BBC computer in the above list, since the BBC was an Acorn Electron in a rebadged box, and sold specifically (initially) to accompany a computer course being run on BBC2 TV.
 
farntfar said:
and it ran off a hard drive rather than off a tape, as did most of the home computers of the time.
Click to expand...
The original IBM PC had a port for a cassette player, though the primary storage was provided its (I believe, optional) one or two 5¼" internal floppy drives. An internal hard drive became available about a year or so later... though it may have been possible to enhance it to control an external hard drive in the interim.
 
The first Winchester drive (as they tended to be called back then) I read about (in PCW, Personal Computer World) was one whose only memorable attributes were that it "sounded like a jet engine" and had a whopping 3Mbytes of storage (which may have been the disk's capacity or what was available to the user).


Warning: These memories (particularly the one concerning the disk's capacity) may have become distorted over time.
 
mosaix said:
I think it was a bit bigger than that VB. It had dos on it. It was a genuine C: drive.
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<sarcasm used>

However big hard drives were not the thing in the 80s - an actual 5 MB hard drive at the start of decade cost thousands of dollars, and it took a couple of decades for drives to get bigger and cheaper. At least the sort of size and cheapness we'd recognise.

A quick google suggests that whatever you put onto your Amstrad it might have been about 180-512 KB of memory. Big for the time, but just the size of slightly big excel file today...

....actually checked the size of my current WIP - 54 pages and 620 KB in my current Word version :giggle:
 
It was, I seem to remember, a PC1640 that had an optional 20mb disc. We started with just the twin floppy but a double slot card with a disc on it came along. Capacity about 10mb and considerably cheaper than the the 20mb offering from Amstrad.

The nice thing about the card was that it just slotted in. No wiring. Booted up as a C: drive.
 
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