Although today's computers are so powerful we can play photo-realistic games or edit entire movies, many of us still remember the days when computing involved keying in lines of BASIC code and waiting for cassettes to load. We've compiled a series of pages below focussing on various models of computer that were popular in the UK at the dawn of the home computing era.
Subcategories
Acorn
Acorn Computers Ltd. was a British company established in Cambridge in the late '70's. The company produced a number of computers which were especially popular in the UK. These included the Acorn Electron, the BBC Micro, and the Acorn Archimedes. The BBC Microcomputer is the most well-known, due to its adoption in education. The BBC Model A had 16kb of RAM, and the Model B had 32. It was followed by the BBC Master
Though the company was broken up into several independent operations in 1998, its legacy includes the development of RISC personal computers. One of its operating systems, RISC OS, continues to be developed by RISC OS Open. Some of Acorn's former subsidiaries live on today—notably ARM Holdings, which is globally dominant in the mobile phone and PDA microprocessor market.
(Above information partly sourced from Wikipedia).
Atari
This club was founded on the interests of Atari members, and this section will shortly detail the various Atari models released over the years. More to follow.
More information to follow...
Dragon
The Dragon 32 and Dragon 64 are home computers that were built in the 1980s. The Dragons are very similar to the TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo), and were produced for the European market by Dragon Data, Ltd., in Port Talbot, Wales, and for the US market by Tano of New Orleans, Louisiana. The model numbers reflect the primary difference between the two machines, which have 32 and 64 kilobytes of RAM, respectively.
Oric
Oric was the name used by Tangerine Computer Systems for a series of home computers, including the original Oric-1, its successor the Oric Atmos and the later Oric Stratos/IQ164 and Oric Telestrat models (model names stylized in upper case).
RaspberryPi
The RaspberryPi computer is a low-cost computer that's little larger than a smartphone. It was initially aimed at incentivising children to program on a computer that they could afford. Costing just £25, all it needs is an SD card, USB keyboard, USB power charger and a TV with a HDMI socket.
More information to follow...
Sinclair
For many Sinclair came into public view in 1980 with the launch of the ZX80, but the company was originally founded in 1973 under the name Ablesdeal Ltd, becoming Sinclair Research Ltd in 1975.
While the ZX80 was initially sold in kit form, the ZX81 was the cheapest home computer in the market you could buy over the counter, at £99.95. It was followed in 1982 by the wildly popular ZX Spectrum, which was subsequently released with various upgrades until 1992 and selling 5 million units. In 1984 they released the Sinclair QL, trying to break into the business market, however this was a failure, selling only 150,000 units and resulting the following year in the rights of the products and brand being sold to Amstrad.
One non-computer product notable of mention is the Sinclair C5, launched in 1984. Late delivery, poor reliability and concerns over safety caused the end of production a year later, with only 17,000 units sold. Sinclair Research Ltd still exists today, marketing company founder Sir Clive Sinclair’s inventions such as the folding A-Bike and the X-1 electric vehicle.