RE: Compute! (December 1984)
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
How ancient :) I miss a ZX Spectrum article or two ...
@tipu curate
0
0
0.000
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
How ancient :) I miss a ZX Spectrum article or two ...
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 10/90) Liquid rewards.
The Commodore 64 was my computer of the 1980s (and early 1990s for that matter). We never really had the ZX Spectrum in the U.S. Well, that's not entirely true. Timex did release the TS1000 (ZX81 clone), TS1500 (ZX Spectrum clone) and TS2068 (enhanced ZX Spectrum clone) but I think at least the last two were intentionally made incompatible with software released on the Spectrum and they never really gained any popularity in the U.S. Available software for them was quite limited. Here it was the Commodore 64, Apple II, VIC-20, and Atari 8-bit that had most of the popularity. Radio Shack also had early success with the TRS-80 models.
You remember well these details.
In Europe, I think it was a tie between Spectrum and Commodore. I had ZX Spectrum 48 with tons of games and apps on the tapes. I even had a homemade hard plastic case with the real keyboard and better power supply unit. I presume the thing would still work if I was to switch it on :)
TRS-80s we had here in Tandy which was the UK arm of RadioShack and were at the back of the catalog. Serious business machines out of reach of us kids until they brought out the little colour home version by which time, they'd missed the home computer boom.
My high school was still using TRS-80 Model IIIs and IVs for programming classes at least as late as 1990. The Color Computers were pretty nice machines for their time (technically 16-bit) and they were well supported by Tandy/Radio Shack, at least in the U.S. for a long time. They never really gained all that much third party support though. I had a friend who owned the CoCo 3. He got it for Christmas and I remember him being disappointed that it wasn't a Commodore 64.