The 2024 BBC B owner "after mating a Raspberry Pi 5's GPIO pins with my Tube interface the benchmark told me, in the voice of Kenneth Kendall, my machine is now 250 times faster than a Cray 1, with 50 times the memory."
@@AndrewRoberts11 Yup - that's pretty much me - I grew up with a C64, and I now own four - but am happy to admit when you take away the SID and VIC chips, what's left is pretty awful.
14:00 - oh, no, this isn't right. Sinclair BASIC was a custom job, not a licenced version of MS BASIC. That's why it has quirks like the string handling. It was designed to be as memory frugal as possible, which is why it's so slow and part of the reason tokenisation is pushed onto the user.
I know that was the case for the ZX-81. I remember the manual (in Spanish, 30 years ago) mentioning that they had hired a “Cambridge mathematics firm” to write it, or some such, which at the time struck me as rather odd. But did they keep the same BASIC core for the Spectrum?
Can't argue with that top 5, exactly the machines & order I thought of during the introduction. The BBC Micro was an astonishingly capable machine for its time. I like to think there's a parallel universe somewhere where technical merit beat market forces. Where ARM captured the general computing market in the late-'80s and (following the great Pentium flop of 1993), the DEC Alpha took over workstation & server market.
@@annebokma4637 It sure was, unlike PowerPC it actually delivered on its performance claims in real/general use. Tradgic that it was taken over and killed off. At least Arm somehow survived.
I really wanted the DEC alpha but the release cost coupled with NT not yet running on it made me give it a pass. I'm assuming that was the nail in their coffin.
@@annebokma4637 Yes they got it working finally, it should have been released with it and it even if they had to postpone the release date it would have got market saturation. I don't know about you but even as a senior hardware engineer I was not going to buy 2 personal systems at the time.
13:56 - I'm fairly sure Sinclair did not licence Microsoft BASIC. the languages have different feature sets, some notable difference are val() does an eval() , restore, gosub, goto, accept expressions, no print using, or arrays of variable-length strings. no Microsoft copyright anywhere.
Our school had one BBC Micro set up with the Z80 Second Processor so that final-year pupils could run CP/M on it. The other two machines (to which I was allocated) were elderly and slightly dodgy RM380Zs.
Agreed about the ZX80 and 81, although my 81 had a 16K RAM pack (not 4). But they were my gateway drug, showing the 11-year old me the delights of BASIC and assembly programming. Forty-odd years later, in semi-retirement I still tip my hat to the late Sir Clive for his cheap tat. And as you say, BBC BASIC was on a separate level to all the others - that was where I started to learn to program properly, on Model Bs, Masters and Archimedeseseses. EDIT: finished watching now. Growing up in the UK I would have agreed that the BBC was best computer - I still think it was the most accessible device for learning BASIC on - no inserting floppies to load an interpreter like on the office PCs, just switch on and go, with an excellent keyboard and the quirky-but-useful COPY facility. I went to a posh-ish school which due to its proximity to Cambridge seemed to get early access to fancy Acorn stuff. So I learnt all about Econet and file servers as a teenager. This isn’t going to turn into a bash-all-the-others rant, just saying that the BBC micro opened worlds of opportunity to those of us who wanted to move beyond games.
For my ZX81 I had what was called a "Special 56k RamPack" by a third-party manufacturer. It placed 8k of RAM where the mirrored part of the ROM normally appeared. This enabled me to copy the cassette loading routines into this area and modify them to disable auto-running of software. It was then easy enough to save a "back-up" copy of a commercial program to a different cassette.
37:50 - This bit about the drive is incorrect in a bunch of ways. The C64 was designed to use the same hardware as the VIC 20, not the PET. However, this wouldn't actually have hobbled it's speed, as the use of the CIA meant that it could potentially hit much higher speeds as the VIC 20's disc access speeds were hobbled by a bug in the VIA chip. Now, the exact details escape me, but the ultimate slow speed of the C64's disc drive interface was down to a some board rework removing the connection to the CIA's shift register, so they had to resort to bit-banging like on the VIC 20, but due to the bus sharing between the 6510 and VIC-II, this ended up being even slower than the VIC 20. The internals of the 1541 and company aren't that weird. The 6502 and VIA are basically multichip FDC. Most FDCs of the time were microcontrollers, which are just a CPU and I/O chip in a single package along with some RAM and ROM. The 1541's board was alll that, just in the form of discrete chips. If you look at any of Intel's FDC's, they were mostly 8052 microcontrollers flashes with some custom firmware.
You're right about the PET - its floppy disk drive used the IEE-488 parallel interface, which was a standard for lab computers. I also remember it being very fast.
My experience(keep in mind, my first time using a computer properly was the A1200 when I was 9) was getting taken to a computer store, seeing the Amstrad CPC and Spectrum struggle with simple tasks like scrolling the screen and poor frame rates(and no, I didn't know what those things were at 5 years old, but I still saw them) and my reaction was basically "that's no better than Atari 2600". I got a C64 and was pleased. Never understood the "brown" thing, to me it was mostly grey and blue. The disk drive thing was... yeah, no one I knew could afford a floppy disk drive, and even if they could, they could've just bought an Atari ST for about the equivalent price of 8-bit computer and floppy drive, and if you really had the cash, you could've put an extra few quid in and got an A500. On the AY sound chip, I never understood why it was used so much, it was really the nail in the coffin for the Amstrad and Spectrum for me. I guess it's just me, but the tones that thing puts out seem to be the exact right frequency to give me genuine physical pain. Not even an "I don't like this noise", but it actually hurt and would give me a migraine if I let it go on too long. I know this is wrong era, but yeah, figured I'd give what happened.
OG Electron owner here, and I have the playground bullying stories to prove it 😂 Never saw an Apple II in the flesh in the UK until the late 80s and early 90s when businesses were dumping them on to the used market. Pretty sure I’d even used a Mac before seeing an Apple II! They were just so far off home users radar over here.
Knowing about these computers by a virtue of being a hardware enthusiast, I didn't think I'd enjoy the listicle format at all, but here we are. Somehow the idea that they weren't just the abstract hardware concepts in vacuum, created to be studied by later generations, but actual devices for people to buy and compare, is fascinating. What could have been the most boring 'top 10 video cards of 2024' turned out to be an enjoyable piece. Thanks!
Delightful episode. Many thanks. No pitchforks from me at all. Acorn / BBC micro never made it big in this parish being geographically outside the BBC area of influence, but you did point out the UK criteria from the start.
Merry Christmas and thanks for all the top tier content. As soon as I hear the 20's music I know I'm in for a treat. Guess I'm dating myself here.........1920's music.
Just a couple of little pitchfork moments, 20:26:00 - whilst singing the virtues of the electron and BBC basic you mention that it was rare that the interpreters of other machines to feature commands to fully leverage the graphics and sound hardware. You wrongly assert the The ZX Spectrum didn't, in reality ZX basic had full drawing and sound (as it was) commands. Pokes were for breadbins ;) I would also argue against your assertion that the Basic interpreters aren't an operating system since the examples you give for the electron having an OS can all be leveraged from the Spectrum's basic commands such as load, save, verify, cat and merge.
AAAAH I tapped this video just from the title, then literally gasped aloud when I heard your voice. I love your content so much, I always miss it until the next installment
Totally agree with your choice of the BBC as the number 1. I still use my own today when I feel nostalgic. Could have used a few more colours in some graphics modes but that was the 80s. 😊
True, although the use of a 3" instead of a 3 1/2" floppy disk drive was a little bit of an eyebrow-raiser (as far as I can tell, it was used mainly by Japanese home computers).
@swevicus I think Amstrad used 3" disks because the drives were cheap, which kept the hardware cost down, even though the disks themselves were expensive. But by the time customers found that out it was too late. I had a Pace 5.25" drive attached to my cpc6128, and the disks were much cheaper, and higher capacity too.
I agree with you about the Atari 400/800 but the 800XL had enough sales to be considered. I'd have took the Spectrum out of the list and put the 800XL at #2 as it had better built in BASIC than c64 and better disk drive.
This may shock you and a lot of people but the zx spectrum 16/48k does have composite video out, but not where you would expect, it is in the expansion port. Later the 128/+2 moved it to the DIN connector.
There was a short lived upto 3k expansion ( in white plastic) for the ZX80 which gave you upto 4k in total. This was even more fragile than the ZX80's case and was replaced by a more robust black 16k unit which was eventually rebadged as the Zx81 expansion...
The RML 480Z also used a serial port floppy drive with a seperate z80 processor in the external drive box on the 'Integrated Disk Controller' which was also used in later 380z machines but this time the same card (with different links et set) as a replacement for the original FDC card, however it connected directly to the internal bus cable. Thankfully the 480z external drive after sending over a small amount of code at (i think) 2400bps, it then swapped both ends to a much higher baud rate until the machine was reset.
Pleased someone else enjoyed RM's finest back in the day. We had a small "Mathematical Computing" society at school which had a 380z and 480z, an electron and a couple of Beebs all in one place so the bullies knew where to find us. I seem to recall the RMs killed floppy disks if you forgot to eject them before powering the machine down, but I could be wrong.
Mallard BASIC was made AFTER Locomotive BASIC (included on the CPC range). Mallard ran on the CP/M of the Amstrad PCW, which came out AFTER their CPC464.
Very comprehensive video, and difficult to argue with. The C64 could indeed be augmented to run various business applications and a GUI. Looking up "Commodore 128D GEOS Battle Station" will give you one, related example. The new C64OS also demonstrates what an augmented C64 is capable of. You are probably right about the best 8-bit version of Elite. You seem to have hands-on experience. Although I always thought the C64 version was pretty good for a 1 Mhz low-res system. The Archimedes is outside the context of this video, but Elite on this system has the reputation of being the best ever.
For all its weaknesses, the Spectrum gave me about 3 years of great gaming, tinkering and programming fun. Then I graduated, went to uni, and got to play with real computers.
Sinclair didn't license MS Basic. I think they might have subcontracted Psion. It does some odd things all of its own. Still, you can daisy-chain up to eight micro-drives (and, presumably, somebody did) and the interface you need to run them came with a centronics printer port for more normal printers and a network interface so you could hook up up to (I think) 60 spectrums. There are about four spectrum games that can be multiplayer via networking. One was a motorcycling game that could handle eight players (supposedly). Personally, I think a networked version of That Bloody Wizard Game I Can Never Remember The Name Of would have been an ideal implementation rather than taking turns with the keyboard and then pretending you're not looking when everyone else picks their spells.
Good lord that audio translation feature is the most horrible thing UA-cam has been forced me to deal with It's like listening to an answering machine!
I had a Spectrum Plus word processing set-up (very elementary but it worked for my purposes). I used a Rotronics Wafadrive -with 2 wafer drives plus a Centronics and RS232 ports. Add a dot-matrix printer and the Tasword software and you're sorted.
No!!!! Obviously the answer is the Memotech MTX 512. You can use it to build a Kelly LeBrock, (probably because of its Z80 assembler built into the BASIC), and you can defend her honor by using it as an offense weapon as it can be wielded as a very effective club if circumstances dictate.
The BBC Micro was an outstanding system, but I never realized that back in the day. We were all poisoned against it by our experiences at school. Every school had a BBC, but very few had teachers who knew how to operate it. So we had assignments that were impossible to complete.
Even as a 9 year old, when the primary school got ZX84's the hate for the "chiclet" keys was strong after doing any typing. The girls high school was fortunate to have Apple's in their lab, so it made sense, for other "reasons" to join the boy's computer club and trudge over there.
yeah, it is largely forgotten that in the 1980's the 2 biggest computer retailers in the UK was WH Smiths (newsagent and stationers) and Boots (a Chemist). And I don't remember them selling more than the Sinclair/Commodore/Acorn and later Amstrad machines. Software they did have for those other systems were mostly due to the explosion of budget software. I did know someone who had an Atari in 81/82 ish, but they never got widespread support until after Jack Tramiel bought Atari and stock cleared the hardware (bought mine from Dixons). I saw Einsteins in the wild, only ONE apple 1
I was going to say the same thing. I think with its proper OS and disk support, first party printer availability, genuinely useful memory expansion possibilities, ROM cards and CPM, the CPC was a better computer than the C64 (outside of gaming). I knew several businesses back in the day that used CPCs, but none that used the C64. There was even a local private school that had a network of CPCs in their lab. Was it the Darling brothers that used to use a CPC as a development machine for other computers? They’d program on the CPC and connect a harness to the target machine for debugging. I may be miss remembering that, but I’m sure some software house did.
You either didn't have a ZX80/1 or have forgotten(04:12), it was only the unmodified ZX80 that flickered when you used the keyboard. The ZX81 had slow mode the interleaved the Compute/ Display modes to give a smoother experience. They had 16K expansion externally not 4K.
Go Electron!, should be no.1!. My second computer after the ZX81, taught me about Basic and got me through Computer Studies CSE grade 1. Still have it with Plus 1/3, brilliant machine with awesome keyboard.
I don’t think our 8 year old brains truly appreciated just what beasts BBC Model B, a real engineer’s machine, I/O for literally everything and then some. I have to admit the CPC464 was a pretty decent machine too. My aunt had one for a time in the early 90s… loading games off tape was pretty old hat by then, but it was fun.
I knew 2 friends at school who had Atari 400/800. Then the Atari 800 XL came out. Since it had a fast 5.25" disk drive, and a dot matrix printer, and a word processor, and joystick ports, plus graphics and sound on a par with C64, I think no 2 is the correct spot. BBC micro was only number 1 in UK due to schools choosing it.
the coco was great at the time, the problem is that time was several years before Dragon Data used it. The CPU was still good, but the VDP let the whole shebang down.
In Germany it was a fight between the C64 and the CPC branch. In fact, rumors have it that the C128 only came out because the CPC 6128 was taking away much of the european market.
I had one those spectrum thermal printers - this was non-sinclair and used white paper. My friend did use it to print out their homework, which was a collage including the printed output. All was going great until they sprayed the whole thing with a fixative spray and it destroyed the printouts.
Re. C64, the inaccuracy about its floppy drives has already been raised, but there's another re. its Basic. The reason it was lacking more sophisticated features wasn't because they didn't want to pay Microsoft (again). It was actually due to cost cutting - Basic v2.0 kept the ROM to 4k. [Some PETs, before the C64, had better versions. There were two Basic expansion cartridges released by Commodore. And, later machines like the C16/+4, C128 (and C65) all got improved versions without any additional payments to Microsoft.]
I brought my Atari 400 in 1982 when I went to University - it was technically the best 8 bit machine. Too expensive for the UK market. I still have that 400 to this day
Enjoyed the video buuuuuut. Whwer is the Memotch MTX serie. Possibly the zenith of Z80 he computer with aspirations of being a useable business machine with a dual disk CP/M upgrade. It also has a movie claim to fame ....😎
Imagine a world where the Internet never caught on outside business and research, you'd be using Prestel and whatever services the BPO saw fit to provide, thinking this was the coolest thing ever.
Erm, the ZX80 and ZX80 didn’t have video circuitry (or at least beyond vestigial). The Z80 was responsible for displaying anything, which is why the screen flickered or blanked when you did anything (it stopped working on displaying things). The ZX81 at least generated sync pulses without CPU help, but it wasn’t until the Spectrum that Sinclair actually put hardware in place to generate a proper video signal.
Danger Will Robenson! Big mistake here, 2:28. Faster is only better if faster is what the user wants. for us geeks and nerds, better is the fact that you don't need a special power line to turn on the computer like Crays did, I think they did. I like a computer that enables me to do cool things, but that requires just a little thought to make it happen. When Visual Basic came out and everyone could make a GUI. well, everybody did. Some of the worst software imaginable was unleashed ahem I mean released on the tragically unprepared masses. I'm still in theripy over some of them. 😊
Wot no honourable mention for the 1982 MSX series, or 1985 Atari ST? The MSX had MIDI, Disk Controller, and Memory Expansion cartridges, if not included as a differentiator in the manufacturers implementations of the standard, an optional Laser Disk expansions, hardware sprites, graphic resolutions, palettes, and games that were no worse than on an Electron (may quick and dirty ZX spectrum ports), came with a vanilla Microsoft Basic, which was better than the Sinclair and Commodore flavours, but not in the Acorn / Amstrad league, and had an optional MS DOS cartridge, standard Atari Joystick ports, the later 1985 MSX 2 offered better sound and graphics than the Commodore 64, and all came with Sinclair and Commodore beating keyboards. The ST came with a floppy, mouse, and GEM GUI, and a 16 bit 68000, 512 KB of RAM, for the same price as a base BBC Micro, though there was virtually no software for the platform till 1986.
Seems like a fair list - though fairly staggered the C64 rated so highly - don't get me wrong, I love the C64. I had one when I was 11 (and I currently own four). But I remember giving my middle school maths teacher pretty much exactly the same speech you just did about how bloody awful the BASIC implementation was, the completely lack of hardware support in it and how much it palled in comparison to the Beeb. The beeb, which, if I remember correctly was used at school to digitise video capture from a camera and was being used to run a light-pen to record borrowing from the library and another was being used to download data from weather satellites.
ZX Spectrum did not use Microsoft BASIC or anything from it. Look it up. I'm not trying to advertise Spectrum in any way - it was made for the target price point but it did have function definitions (DEF FN) graphics commands (ink, paper, border, plot, draw, circle) and sound control for what it's hardware could easily do: BEEP with frequency and duration control. Now, I was salivating for BBC B and wanted and Electron as a cheaper possbility but from what I gather as an outsider (not in UK), wasn't it a failure? How many were actually sold, used in home?
With respect to the attributes clash, this wasn't uncommon. C64, for example, had a similar issue, but it also had other modes (lower resolution than ZX Spectrum) and support for sprites (not to mention its famous SID chip)
CPC vet here. Shockingly, had considered the Oric-1 a couple of years eariier. Any Atari ST vets seething at the cut-off? [Oh, do I get bonus points for using the SGI IRIS Indigo a decade on?]
I think it's more accurate to say the time period considered is 1980-1984. If including 1985, then the Commodore 128 and Atari ST would surely be in the top 5. [Amiga was too expensive and NTSC only in 85, and MSX machines too rare in UK]
In some senses calling things like ZX80 and 81 and other similar things computers is questionable. I used to waltz around with various items in my pocket that people called calculators. Very few people called them computers, but to be fair - they kick the living and undead shit out of some of these "computers". But in general the UK focus means it doesn't really apply to anywhere else. I've had a Spectrum. The dead flesh keyboard one. I don't think I got a PSU for it but I can't remember for sure. I never did anything with it other than sort of make fun of it, I have no idea if it worked or not, it was just funny as a thing. But I didn't live in the UK, so whether it did or didn't work didn't matter. My start of sniffing at computers that actually did something, however limited it was, was VIC-20 that did show a picture when all connected up to a TV. You could type on it, or well, force the keys down with luck and effort one by one. I did write a loop to print a short string of text to the screen, but that was as far as I got with it. Which is going further than anyone else did as far as I know. I did start trying to type a game into the thing from a magazine, but after a bit over an hour I went to take a break outside and someone helpfully turned it off. I also got an Amstrad PPC640 without any floppies at one point, it had a basic interpreter built in, which I also wrote a text printing loop into that was a bit more complex than the one on the VIC. I wrote it down on paper to remember it, since I had no way to save anything on it. Then I got a Toshiba MSX which I did actually get as far as playing a game on! Whee! I have no idea what happened to it anymore. I did get exposed to an Amiga 500 a bit, and play games on it, and I did get to click around on a Macintosh SE I think, my mom had one for a bit. The Amiga and the Mac were what I would agree to call Computer. Barely, but they just squeak into that classification. Everything else I've mentioned is just proto-computer sheisse, mostly because you can actually DO stuff with them, like write and save a text to a floppy, and open it back up and read it. I know you theoretically can on the previously mentioned proto computer dogpoops but I don't care. Zero Fuggs Given. Do not despair, I never got to do much on either, and thus do not care about them at all. Now we finally get to stuff I actually got to use! Woohoo! This includes AGA generation Amigas, as well as a 486 quickly followed by a Pentium 60mhz. I was reasonably happy with the Amiga, even got an A4000/040 that I had a while, then I had various forms of workstations, from SPARC to SGI to Motorola MicroStack and IBM RS/6000. I ended up having a wide variety of computers, from a SPARC laptop to several different SGI machines including an ONYX RE2 and many RS/6000 systems and a HP-UX box of some denomination that was too much work to get going to bother. Oh, also a SS1000E with 8 processors and 1gig memory, which was a huge deal at the time. Also far too loud to keep running more than a couple of hours at a time. After this I bailed and just used PC's, although I think most people would raise an eyebrow at the configurations I have surrounding me even today, the machines within 1m of me typing right now include an 18core box, a 14 core box and a HP ML350G10 that unfortunately only has one CPU at the moment, but will eventually get upgraded to dual 28 core I think. Typing this on a boring quadcore laptop though, I don't use the other stuff to "surf the interwebz" on, they have no monitors connected right now, only power and network cables. So, this is sort of a compressed retroish dive as well as what I think is a computer in the proper sense and what isn't. I had many more machines than the ones mentioned here, but they weren't important for this specific idea.
Okay, I think your were bit hard on the Co--Co TRS-80 (and it Dragon, Welsh counter part), the TRS-80 was more than just one model like Spectrum, but unlike Spectrum, under cover the basicly still all the same machine, so the all the software eco-system, the later model, did start doing things the first model could not, but they all feel the same more or less, and back to not stock out of the box, but the system that was setup, the have, with all the must have, to make it usable? The TRS-80 had a long list of in-house add-ons; most of the bit covers for the over-machines cover in your countdown of the top 5 retro computers. and TRS-80 had big brothers to real businesses (proper computers that more or less worked the same, and the up-grade system was aloud; the stock TRS-80 colour basic was (in-house) upgradeable to an extended basic that any machine that was doing software for machines would have). and one of a very small list of possible one or machines, the actly "MICROSOFT BASIC, EXTENDED..." As the boot-up taglane, before typing anything comes up on the screen? But as I say, I think if BBC you put in the number 1 slot, it can just use any CPU it wants to, and still, the total moden CPU, like the Pi Arm chip, is a hard function to beat? 🙂
I must admit from what I have seen of the Tandy 1000 I really like it. Budget wise in the UK it would have been very out of bounds for the home market, for almost everyone. Disposable incomes in the US used to be so much higher in the 80s than in the UK.
British microcomputer scene seems to be the most interesting one, yea america had something special but, not as interesting. Not as varied. And. Well. Soviet ones are interesting as curiosities. Living in Finland, i sometimes see them on the market here too. Fascinating things. But mostly just clones of existing systems. Also. Japanese systems are interesting. Very varied and very different. But hard to find info on in languages i can understand. So. British it is. The land of early computing that i find the most interesting. And. Yep thank you for making it the area this video is about.
When you say "operating system", it seems you mean the user interface; I always thought the C64 has a great UI, with the commands of a full blown programming language (not just OS commands) in direct mode, resulting in a command screen (commands can be anywhere, can be repeated with or without modification, put into a loop, etc. ) and not just a command line as in MS DOS or Linux.
Well, I must say a great list. And being related to UK, not really the list I would made, since experience in my country was quite different. Like there was no BBCs. Well maybe a dozen in all. But I agree, it always seemed like hell of the computer. I hated BBC mostly because I had to peek&poke in Basic my computer had (because of that cheap,cheap bastard that made Gates so angry on anything C= afterwards ). It was so bad that I later bought Simon's Basic to be able to draw some 3D staff for my final project in school. Never had a floppy, so my word processor texts were saved on tape. Yay But games... oh boy, those were just great. I think Commodore was at least two years late with C128D (it was original idea, not the one without disk drive), cause that was a great machine. I suppose Atari ST/Amiga came too late to be considered. But what about Amstrad 6128?
Really love your ch and content. The in depth dives into retro computer content is 2nd to none. Thank you so much for your hard work. Happy holidays to you and your family.
Commodore 64 sold in millions, got 2nd place, BBC Micro was completely unknown in europe and sold "reasonable well" - and this got 1st place??? Only on your island, dude, only on that island... 🤣 I wuold say, the C64 was over the top! You could do gaming, but also serious stuff with controlling relais, using it as a weather-station and so much more!
What, no Nascom 2? Just kidding, your list is hard to argue against given the boundaries. Now make one for the following 5 years. That would be a lot more contentious I think.
4:56 I think you mixed here zx80 and zx81 wich flickered only in FAST mode. Also is not the RAM access problem, all 8bits of that era had this problem... But in ZX80, ZX81 CPU literaly generated video, so could flicker (Zx80) or be 4 times slower and don't (zx81 in SLOW mode ). Also suggesting that some one could blind type on zx81 or zx spectrum due to keyboard modes is ridiculous;) ZX81 membranes after some use tend to develeop dimples so if you were stubborn and patient enough you could start blind typing 🤣
The Electron was absolutely awful. Without mode 7, 32k was not enough memory. It was really slow and the sound was one channel. It had to be given away at massively discounted prices that bankrupted Acorn. The only good thing about it was the keyboard
@@JesterEric Tell me you never used an eletron without telling me you never used an electron. Also we know why Acorn went bust and need to be bailed out by olivettie, as there is a rather well known study conducted at the time. It mostly boils down to massive overspend on the ABC with never made it to production. Acorn management's lack of understating as to how shipping from East Asia worked, and the nature of sale or return.
@@RetroBytesUKThe ABC did make it into production (at least the 110 and cambridge workstation), but was hugely unsuccessful due to high price and the fact that a 110 was basically a bbc b+, copro and harddrive.
Commodore 64 users: "Okay, but does the Cray Supercomputer have hardware sprites and scrolling?"
The 2024 BBC B owner "after mating a Raspberry Pi 5's GPIO pins with my Tube interface the benchmark told me, in the voice of Kenneth Kendall, my machine is now 250 times faster than a Cray 1, with 50 times the memory."
@AndrewRoberts11 Ah, Kenneth Kendall, that tasks me back. "Now available in chip form" 😉
@@FatNorthernBigot Cray Cray got nothing
@@AndrewRoberts11 Now that's what I call progress
@@AndrewRoberts11 Yup - that's pretty much me - I grew up with a C64, and I now own four - but am happy to admit when you take away the SID and VIC chips, what's left is pretty awful.
14:00 - oh, no, this isn't right. Sinclair BASIC was a custom job, not a licenced version of MS BASIC. That's why it has quirks like the string handling. It was designed to be as memory frugal as possible, which is why it's so slow and part of the reason tokenisation is pushed onto the user.
The up point with the tokenisation etc approach is suddenly dyslexia is less of a problem with commands.
I know that was the case for the ZX-81. I remember the manual (in Spanish, 30 years ago) mentioning that they had hired a “Cambridge mathematics firm” to write it, or some such, which at the time struck me as rather odd. But did they keep the same BASIC core for the Spectrum?
Also it its defence Sinclar / 9 Tiles BASIC did include BEEP, PLOT, DRAW and CIRCLE commands...
Loved it! As always, an enjoyable trip. Dunno if you noticed but number 2 on the countdown is actually titled "4" heh
Can't argue with that top 5, exactly the machines & order I thought of during the introduction. The BBC Micro was an astonishingly capable machine for its time.
I like to think there's a parallel universe somewhere where technical merit beat market forces. Where ARM captured the general computing market in the late-'80s and (following the great Pentium flop of 1993), the DEC Alpha took over workstation & server market.
Alpha was a lovely piece of kit
@@annebokma4637 It sure was, unlike PowerPC it actually delivered on its performance claims in real/general use. Tradgic that it was taken over and killed off.
At least Arm somehow survived.
I really wanted the DEC alpha but the release cost coupled with NT not yet running on it made me give it a pass.
I'm assuming that was the nail in their coffin.
@noanyobiseniss7462 so it was you 😜 I used it with NT, ran rather well 😁
@@annebokma4637 Yes they got it working finally, it should have been released with it and it even if they had to postpone the release date it would have got market saturation. I don't know about you but even as a senior hardware engineer I was not going to buy 2 personal systems at the time.
13:56 - I'm fairly sure Sinclair did not licence Microsoft BASIC. the languages have different feature sets, some notable difference are val() does an eval() , restore, gosub, goto, accept expressions, no print using, or arrays of variable-length strings. no Microsoft copyright anywhere.
Our school had one BBC Micro set up with the Z80 Second Processor so that final-year pupils could run CP/M on it. The other two machines (to which I was allocated) were elderly and slightly dodgy RM380Zs.
Agreed about the ZX80 and 81, although my 81 had a 16K RAM pack (not 4).
But they were my gateway drug, showing the 11-year old me the delights of BASIC and assembly programming. Forty-odd years later, in semi-retirement I still tip my hat to the late Sir Clive for his cheap tat.
And as you say, BBC BASIC was on a separate level to all the others - that was where I started to learn to program properly, on Model Bs, Masters and Archimedeseseses.
EDIT: finished watching now. Growing up in the UK I would have agreed that the BBC was best computer - I still think it was the most accessible device for learning BASIC on - no inserting floppies to load an interpreter like on the office PCs, just switch on and go, with an excellent keyboard and the quirky-but-useful COPY facility.
I went to a posh-ish school which due to its proximity to Cambridge seemed to get early access to fancy Acorn stuff. So I learnt all about Econet and file servers as a teenager. This isn’t going to turn into a bash-all-the-others rant, just saying that the BBC micro opened worlds of opportunity to those of us who wanted to move beyond games.
For my ZX81 I had what was called a "Special 56k RamPack" by a third-party manufacturer. It placed 8k of RAM where the mirrored part of the ROM normally appeared. This enabled me to copy the cassette loading routines into this area and modify them to disable auto-running of software. It was then easy enough to save a "back-up" copy of a commercial program to a different cassette.
37:50 - This bit about the drive is incorrect in a bunch of ways. The C64 was designed to use the same hardware as the VIC 20, not the PET. However, this wouldn't actually have hobbled it's speed, as the use of the CIA meant that it could potentially hit much higher speeds as the VIC 20's disc access speeds were hobbled by a bug in the VIA chip. Now, the exact details escape me, but the ultimate slow speed of the C64's disc drive interface was down to a some board rework removing the connection to the CIA's shift register, so they had to resort to bit-banging like on the VIC 20, but due to the bus sharing between the 6510 and VIC-II, this ended up being even slower than the VIC 20.
The internals of the 1541 and company aren't that weird. The 6502 and VIA are basically multichip FDC. Most FDCs of the time were microcontrollers, which are just a CPU and I/O chip in a single package along with some RAM and ROM. The 1541's board was alll that, just in the form of discrete chips. If you look at any of Intel's FDC's, they were mostly 8052 microcontrollers flashes with some custom firmware.
You're right about the PET - its floppy disk drive used the IEE-488 parallel interface, which was a standard for lab computers. I also remember it being very fast.
"unsurprisingly a PC from the 2000s is a bit better than a ZX Spectrum" -- Of all the untrue things I have ever ever heard, this is the untruest
a pc from the 90s was parr with playstation
By the 2000s the PC was fast enough to emulate a Spectrum at full speed. This makes the statement perfectly true.
Y'all clearly don't understand humor....
@@Dr.Logistik a speccy was a crude computer...it was good because it was fast
My experience(keep in mind, my first time using a computer properly was the A1200 when I was 9) was getting taken to a computer store, seeing the Amstrad CPC and Spectrum struggle with simple tasks like scrolling the screen and poor frame rates(and no, I didn't know what those things were at 5 years old, but I still saw them) and my reaction was basically "that's no better than Atari 2600". I got a C64 and was pleased. Never understood the "brown" thing, to me it was mostly grey and blue.
The disk drive thing was... yeah, no one I knew could afford a floppy disk drive, and even if they could, they could've just bought an Atari ST for about the equivalent price of 8-bit computer and floppy drive, and if you really had the cash, you could've put an extra few quid in and got an A500.
On the AY sound chip, I never understood why it was used so much, it was really the nail in the coffin for the Amstrad and Spectrum for me. I guess it's just me, but the tones that thing puts out seem to be the exact right frequency to give me genuine physical pain. Not even an "I don't like this noise", but it actually hurt and would give me a migraine if I let it go on too long.
I know this is wrong era, but yeah, figured I'd give what happened.
OG Electron owner here, and I have the playground bullying stories to prove it 😂
Never saw an Apple II in the flesh in the UK until the late 80s and early 90s when businesses were dumping them on to the used market.
Pretty sure I’d even used a Mac before seeing an Apple II! They were just so far off home users radar over here.
I've got that music stuck in my head. Merry bloody christmas.
really compehensive coverage of the top 5, smashing viewing at a nostalgic time of year.. Merry Christmas!
Knowing about these computers by a virtue of being a hardware enthusiast, I didn't think I'd enjoy the listicle format at all, but here we are. Somehow the idea that they weren't just the abstract hardware concepts in vacuum, created to be studied by later generations, but actual devices for people to buy and compare, is fascinating. What could have been the most boring 'top 10 video cards of 2024' turned out to be an enjoyable piece. Thanks!
Sorry Retrobytes, regarding the ZX80 and 81. Surely you mean 16K expansion pack not 4K? Unless I missed a 4K expansion for just the ZX80.
And an elastic band worked better. Wrapped around the edges of the zx81. Smh. Literally unwatchable. Xmas ruined.
Want there a 2k expansion? Seem to remember having one of those for a day before the keyboard died 😂
No I'm stoichiometry. No 4K. Just 16K that cost more than the 1K beauty.
Yup, 8 4116 DRAM chips in an external package. A 4K expansion pack would have been 8 2114 SRAM chips and would have probably cost more.
Delightful episode. Many thanks. No pitchforks from me at all. Acorn / BBC micro never made it big in this parish being geographically outside the BBC area of influence, but you did point out the UK criteria from the start.
Number 3!
Number 4!
...and the winner... Number 1!
He did that bit on a spectrum;-)
Merry Christmas and thanks for all the top tier content. As soon as I hear the 20's music I know I'm in for a treat. Guess I'm dating myself here.........1920's music.
"Amstrad CPC464, the only machine sold by the foot". Chapeau, sir.
You seem to have 4 and 2 confused at 33:55 :)
He's confused because C64 should have been number one, as it is the number one best selling personal computer of all time.
@@rs.matr1x Best selling ≠ best. The BBC Micro was technologically far better than the 64.
Just a couple of little pitchfork moments, 20:26:00 - whilst singing the virtues of the electron and BBC basic you mention that it was rare that the interpreters of other machines to feature commands to fully leverage the graphics and sound hardware. You wrongly assert the The ZX Spectrum didn't, in reality ZX basic had full drawing and sound (as it was) commands. Pokes were for breadbins ;) I would also argue against your assertion that the Basic interpreters aren't an operating system since the examples you give for the electron having an OS can all be leveraged from the Spectrum's basic commands such as load, save, verify, cat and merge.
AAAAH I tapped this video just from the title, then literally gasped aloud when I heard your voice. I love your content so much, I always miss it until the next installment
Totally agree with your choice of the BBC as the number 1. I still use my own today when I feel nostalgic. Could have used a few more colours in some graphics modes but that was the 80s. 😊
I really enjoyed my CPC 6128. There was some decent games for it and the fact that it ran CPM made it useful as a real computer.
And because it was CP/M Plus (or CP/M 3.0) it used the CPC6128's banked memory, so it would run practically any CP/M software you could throw at it.
True, although the use of a 3" instead of a 3 1/2" floppy disk drive was a little bit of an eyebrow-raiser (as far as I can tell, it was used mainly by Japanese home computers).
@swevicus I think Amstrad used 3" disks because the drives were cheap, which kept the hardware cost down, even though the disks themselves were expensive. But by the time customers found that out it was too late. I had a Pace 5.25" drive attached to my cpc6128, and the disks were much cheaper, and higher capacity too.
I agree with you about the Atari 400/800 but the 800XL had enough sales to be considered. I'd have took the Spectrum out of the list and put the 800XL at #2 as it had better built in BASIC than c64 and better disk drive.
This may shock you and a lot of people but the zx spectrum 16/48k does have composite video out, but not where you would expect, it is in the expansion port. Later the 128/+2 moved it to the DIN connector.
My introduction to the quaint world of British home computing was a paperback by Dick Francis: “Twice Shy” which probably precedes your top five.
I can't really disagree with the order, given the Beeb was definitely the most like a proper, fully-featured machine.
There was a short lived upto 3k expansion ( in white plastic) for the ZX80 which gave you upto 4k in total. This was even more fragile than the ZX80's case and was replaced by a more robust black 16k unit which was eventually rebadged as the Zx81 expansion...
The RML 480Z also used a serial port floppy drive with a seperate z80 processor in the external drive box on the 'Integrated Disk Controller' which was also used in later 380z machines but this time the same card (with different links et set) as a replacement for the original FDC card, however it connected directly to the internal bus cable.
Thankfully the 480z external drive after sending over a small amount of code at (i think) 2400bps, it then swapped both ends to a much higher baud rate until the machine was reset.
Pleased someone else enjoyed RM's finest back in the day. We had a small "Mathematical Computing" society at school which had a 380z and 480z, an electron and a couple of Beebs all in one place so the bullies knew where to find us. I seem to recall the RMs killed floppy disks if you forgot to eject them before powering the machine down, but I could be wrong.
Always great to learn about these machines that we never had over here.
Second Cousin's former roommate?? A Spaceballs fan I see.
Mallard BASIC was made AFTER Locomotive BASIC (included on the CPC range). Mallard ran on the CP/M of the Amstrad PCW, which came out AFTER their CPC464.
Very comprehensive video, and difficult to argue with.
The C64 could indeed be augmented to run various business applications and a GUI.
Looking up "Commodore 128D GEOS Battle Station" will give you one, related example. The new C64OS also demonstrates what an augmented C64 is capable of.
You are probably right about the best 8-bit version of Elite. You seem to have hands-on experience. Although I always thought the C64 version was pretty good for a 1 Mhz low-res system.
The Archimedes is outside the context of this video, but Elite on this system has the reputation of being the best ever.
For all its weaknesses, the Spectrum gave me about 3 years of great gaming, tinkering and programming fun. Then I graduated, went to uni, and got to play with real computers.
Sinclair didn't license MS Basic. I think they might have subcontracted Psion. It does some odd things all of its own.
Still, you can daisy-chain up to eight micro-drives (and, presumably, somebody did) and the interface you need to run them came with a centronics printer port for more normal printers and a network interface so you could hook up up to (I think) 60 spectrums. There are about four spectrum games that can be multiplayer via networking. One was a motorcycling game that could handle eight players (supposedly). Personally, I think a networked version of That Bloody Wizard Game I Can Never Remember The Name Of would have been an ideal implementation rather than taking turns with the keyboard and then pretending you're not looking when everyone else picks their spells.
Good lord that audio translation feature is the most horrible thing UA-cam has been forced me to deal with
It's like listening to an answering machine!
I had a Spectrum Plus word processing set-up (very elementary but it worked for my purposes). I used a Rotronics Wafadrive -with 2 wafer drives plus a Centronics and RS232 ports. Add a dot-matrix printer and the Tasword software and you're sorted.
No!!!! Obviously the answer is the Memotech MTX 512. You can use it to build a Kelly LeBrock, (probably because of its Z80 assembler built into the BASIC), and you can defend her honor by using it as an offense weapon as it can be wielded as a very effective club if circumstances dictate.
The time's range is a bit random and specific... It's bang on for me! :-) Thanks!
Oh we poked Dave, Neil and Ollie about this :)
The BBC Micro was an outstanding system, but I never realized that back in the day. We were all poisoned against it by our experiences at school. Every school had a BBC, but very few had teachers who knew how to operate it. So we had assignments that were impossible to complete.
I had an SFD 1001 floppy drive with my C64 (with a switchable ROM to be able to use it). Man, I never felt like having so much space again in my life.
Amazing to see the beautiful beeb at no.1! I love the bbc micro :)
Even as a 9 year old, when the primary school got ZX84's the hate for the "chiclet" keys was strong after doing any typing. The girls high school was fortunate to have Apple's in their lab, so it made sense, for other "reasons" to join the boy's computer club and trudge over there.
yeah, it is largely forgotten that in the 1980's the 2 biggest computer retailers in the UK was WH Smiths (newsagent and stationers) and Boots (a Chemist). And I don't remember them selling more than the Sinclair/Commodore/Acorn and later Amstrad machines. Software they did have for those other systems were mostly due to the explosion of budget software.
I did know someone who had an Atari in 81/82 ish, but they never got widespread support until after Jack Tramiel bought Atari and stock cleared the hardware (bought mine from Dixons).
I saw Einsteins in the wild, only ONE apple 1
Lovely listicle! :)
I'd swap 2 and 3 around, but it's hard to argue with your picks.
I was going to say the same thing. I think with its proper OS and disk support, first party printer availability, genuinely useful memory expansion possibilities, ROM cards and CPM, the CPC was a better computer than the C64 (outside of gaming). I knew several businesses back in the day that used CPCs, but none that used the C64. There was even a local private school that had a network of CPCs in their lab. Was it the Darling brothers that used to use a CPC as a development machine for other computers? They’d program on the CPC and connect a harness to the target machine for debugging. I may be miss remembering that, but I’m sure some software house did.
You either didn't have a ZX80/1 or have forgotten(04:12), it was only the unmodified ZX80 that flickered when you used the keyboard. The ZX81 had slow mode the interleaved the Compute/ Display modes to give a smoother experience. They had 16K expansion externally not 4K.
Go Electron!, should be no.1!. My second computer after the ZX81, taught me about Basic and got me through Computer Studies CSE grade 1. Still have it with Plus 1/3, brilliant machine with awesome keyboard.
I don’t think our 8 year old brains truly appreciated just what beasts BBC Model B, a real engineer’s machine, I/O for literally everything and then some.
I have to admit the CPC464 was a pretty decent machine too. My aunt had one for a time in the early 90s… loading games off tape was pretty old hat by then, but it was fun.
Yippee 🎉🎉 a new RetroBytes video. Happy day's...
I knew 2 friends at school who had Atari 400/800. Then the Atari 800 XL came out. Since it had a fast 5.25" disk drive, and a dot matrix printer, and a word processor, and joystick ports, plus graphics and sound on a par with C64, I think no 2 is the correct spot. BBC micro was only number 1 in UK due to schools choosing it.
the coco was great at the time, the problem is that time was several years before Dragon Data used it.
The CPU was still good, but the VDP let the whole shebang down.
In France, which had a pretty poor home computer market, the CPC was all the rage. Almost all the kids I knew had one.
In Germany it was a fight between the C64 and the CPC branch. In fact, rumors have it that the C128 only came out because the CPC 6128 was taking away much of the european market.
I had one those spectrum thermal printers - this was non-sinclair and used white paper. My friend did use it to print out their homework, which was a collage including the printed output. All was going great until they sprayed the whole thing with a fixative spray and it destroyed the printouts.
Re. C64, the inaccuracy about its floppy drives has already been raised, but there's another re. its Basic. The reason it was lacking more sophisticated features wasn't because they didn't want to pay Microsoft (again). It was actually due to cost cutting - Basic v2.0 kept the ROM to 4k. [Some PETs, before the C64, had better versions. There were two Basic expansion cartridges released by Commodore. And, later machines like the C16/+4, C128 (and C65) all got improved versions without any additional payments to Microsoft.]
I brought my Atari 400 in 1982 when I went to University - it was technically the best 8 bit machine. Too expensive for the UK market. I still have that 400 to this day
Enjoyed the video buuuuuut. Whwer is the Memotch MTX serie. Possibly the zenith of Z80 he computer with aspirations of being a useable business machine with a dual disk CP/M upgrade. It also has a movie claim to fame ....😎
Imagine a world where the Internet never caught on outside business and research, you'd be using Prestel and whatever services the BPO saw fit to provide, thinking this was the coolest thing ever.
I've used all of these except BBC/Electron. The 464 was my second machine.
Erm, the ZX80 and ZX80 didn’t have video circuitry (or at least beyond vestigial). The Z80 was responsible for displaying anything, which is why the screen flickered or blanked when you did anything (it stopped working on displaying things). The ZX81 at least generated sync pulses without CPU help, but it wasn’t until the Spectrum that Sinclair actually put hardware in place to generate a proper video signal.
for my top 5, i would go: 5. commodore amiga 2000, 4. Techtronix 3. Acorn System 3/5 2. BBC micro 1. Acorn archimedes (bug box)
Danger Will Robenson! Big mistake here, 2:28. Faster is only better if faster is what the user wants. for us geeks and nerds, better is the fact that you don't need a special power line to turn on the computer like Crays did, I think they did. I like a computer that enables me to do cool things, but that requires just a little thought to make it happen. When Visual Basic came out and everyone could make a GUI. well, everybody did. Some of the worst software imaginable was unleashed ahem I mean released on the tragically unprepared masses. I'm still in theripy over some of them. 😊
Wot no honourable mention for the 1982 MSX series, or 1985 Atari ST? The MSX had MIDI, Disk Controller, and Memory Expansion cartridges, if not included as a differentiator in the manufacturers implementations of the standard, an optional Laser Disk expansions, hardware sprites, graphic resolutions, palettes, and games that were no worse than on an Electron (may quick and dirty ZX spectrum ports), came with a vanilla Microsoft Basic, which was better than the Sinclair and Commodore flavours, but not in the Acorn / Amstrad league, and had an optional MS DOS cartridge, standard Atari Joystick ports, the later 1985 MSX 2 offered better sound and graphics than the Commodore 64, and all came with Sinclair and Commodore beating keyboards. The ST came with a floppy, mouse, and GEM GUI, and a 16 bit 68000, 512 KB of RAM, for the same price as a base BBC Micro, though there was virtually no software for the platform till 1986.
Seems like a fair list - though fairly staggered the C64 rated so highly - don't get me wrong, I love the C64. I had one when I was 11 (and I currently own four). But I remember giving my middle school maths teacher pretty much exactly the same speech you just did about how bloody awful the BASIC implementation was, the completely lack of hardware support in it and how much it palled in comparison to the Beeb. The beeb, which, if I remember correctly was used at school to digitise video capture from a camera and was being used to run a light-pen to record borrowing from the library and another was being used to download data from weather satellites.
ZX Spectrum did not use Microsoft BASIC or anything from it. Look it up. I'm not trying to advertise Spectrum in any way - it was made for the target price point but it did have function definitions (DEF FN) graphics commands (ink, paper, border, plot, draw, circle) and sound control for what it's hardware could easily do: BEEP with frequency and duration control.
Now, I was salivating for BBC B and wanted and Electron as a cheaper possbility but from what I gather as an outsider (not in UK), wasn't it a failure? How many were actually sold, used in home?
With respect to the attributes clash, this wasn't uncommon. C64, for example, had a similar issue, but it also had other modes (lower resolution than ZX Spectrum) and support for sprites (not to mention its famous SID chip)
Please, save me. What is the tune name @5:45?
Minor swing
Minor swing
I am a invalid spastic, It was so cool to use computers in the 80s. Today i am crippled
CPC vet here. Shockingly, had considered the Oric-1 a couple of years eariier. Any Atari ST vets seething at the cut-off? [Oh, do I get bonus points for using the SGI IRIS Indigo a decade on?]
I think it's more accurate to say the time period considered is 1980-1984. If including 1985, then the Commodore 128 and Atari ST would surely be in the top 5. [Amiga was too expensive and NTSC only in 85, and MSX machines too rare in UK]
hahaha . a wild dave appears :D
In some senses calling things like ZX80 and 81 and other similar things computers is questionable. I used to waltz around with various items in my pocket that people called calculators. Very few people called them computers, but to be fair - they kick the living and undead shit out of some of these "computers". But in general the UK focus means it doesn't really apply to anywhere else. I've had a Spectrum. The dead flesh keyboard one. I don't think I got a PSU for it but I can't remember for sure. I never did anything with it other than sort of make fun of it, I have no idea if it worked or not, it was just funny as a thing. But I didn't live in the UK, so whether it did or didn't work didn't matter.
My start of sniffing at computers that actually did something, however limited it was, was VIC-20 that did show a picture when all connected up to a TV. You could type on it, or well, force the keys down with luck and effort one by one. I did write a loop to print a short string of text to the screen, but that was as far as I got with it. Which is going further than anyone else did as far as I know. I did start trying to type a game into the thing from a magazine, but after a bit over an hour I went to take a break outside and someone helpfully turned it off.
I also got an Amstrad PPC640 without any floppies at one point, it had a basic interpreter built in, which I also wrote a text printing loop into that was a bit more complex than the one on the VIC. I wrote it down on paper to remember it, since I had no way to save anything on it. Then I got a Toshiba MSX which I did actually get as far as playing a game on! Whee! I have no idea what happened to it anymore.
I did get exposed to an Amiga 500 a bit, and play games on it, and I did get to click around on a Macintosh SE I think, my mom had one for a bit.
The Amiga and the Mac were what I would agree to call Computer. Barely, but they just squeak into that classification. Everything else I've mentioned is just proto-computer sheisse, mostly because you can actually DO stuff with them, like write and save a text to a floppy, and open it back up and read it. I know you theoretically can on the previously mentioned proto computer dogpoops but I don't care. Zero Fuggs Given. Do not despair, I never got to do much on either, and thus do not care about them at all.
Now we finally get to stuff I actually got to use! Woohoo! This includes AGA generation Amigas, as well as a 486 quickly followed by a Pentium 60mhz. I was reasonably happy with the Amiga, even got an A4000/040 that I had a while, then I had various forms of workstations, from SPARC to SGI to Motorola MicroStack and IBM RS/6000.
I ended up having a wide variety of computers, from a SPARC laptop to several different SGI machines including an ONYX RE2 and many RS/6000 systems and a HP-UX box of some denomination that was too much work to get going to bother. Oh, also a SS1000E with 8 processors and 1gig memory, which was a huge deal at the time. Also far too loud to keep running more than a couple of hours at a time. After this I bailed and just used PC's, although I think most people would raise an eyebrow at the configurations I have surrounding me even today, the machines within 1m of me typing right now include an 18core box, a 14 core box and a HP ML350G10 that unfortunately only has one CPU at the moment, but will eventually get upgraded to dual 28 core I think. Typing this on a boring quadcore laptop though, I don't use the other stuff to "surf the interwebz" on, they have no monitors connected right now, only power and network cables.
So, this is sort of a compressed retroish dive as well as what I think is a computer in the proper sense and what isn't. I had many more machines than the ones mentioned here, but they weren't important for this specific idea.
Okay, I think your were bit hard on the Co--Co TRS-80 (and it Dragon, Welsh counter part), the TRS-80 was more than just one model like Spectrum, but unlike Spectrum, under cover the basicly still all the same machine, so the all the software eco-system, the later model, did start doing things the first model could not, but they all feel the same more or less, and back to not stock out of the box, but the system that was setup, the have, with all the must have, to make it usable? The TRS-80 had a long list of in-house add-ons; most of the bit covers for the over-machines cover in your countdown of the top 5 retro computers. and TRS-80 had big brothers to real businesses (proper computers that more or less worked the same, and the up-grade system was aloud; the stock TRS-80 colour basic was (in-house) upgradeable to an extended basic that any machine that was doing software for machines would have). and one of a very small list of possible one or machines, the actly "MICROSOFT BASIC, EXTENDED..." As the boot-up taglane, before typing anything comes up on the screen? But as I say, I think if BBC you put in the number 1 slot, it can just use any CPU it wants to, and still, the total moden CPU, like the Pi Arm chip, is a hard function to beat? 🙂
My order for USA 1980-1985: Tandy 1000, Commodore 64, Apple IIe or IIc, TRS 80 Color Computer 2, Atari 800XL
I must admit from what I have seen of the Tandy 1000 I really like it. Budget wise in the UK it would have been very out of bounds for the home market, for almost everyone. Disposable incomes in the US used to be so much higher in the 80s than in the UK.
20:40 this is wrong, the ZX Spectrum DID have graphics drawing functions in BASIC. Perhaps you meant the C64?
British microcomputer scene seems to be the most interesting one, yea america had something special but, not as interesting. Not as varied. And. Well. Soviet ones are interesting as curiosities. Living in Finland, i sometimes see them on the market here too. Fascinating things. But mostly just clones of existing systems. Also. Japanese systems are interesting. Very varied and very different. But hard to find info on in languages i can understand.
So. British it is. The land of early computing that i find the most interesting. And. Yep thank you for making it the area this video is about.
TSR80 🙃
You know you have a tough audience, when you need 10 minutes explaining your top 5 selection
On the Cray XMP vs Speccy 48k debate, I'd argue that the win isn't 100% for the cray. I'd personally argue the Speccy had better games.
Musical chairs was more feasible on the Cray than the Speccy.
Oh yeah! :)
When you say "operating system", it seems you mean the user interface; I always thought the C64 has a great UI, with the commands of a full blown programming language (not just OS commands) in direct mode, resulting in a command screen (commands can be anywhere, can be repeated with or without modification, put into a loop, etc. ) and not just a command line as in MS DOS or Linux.
Your intro card for the C64 repeats position 4 (instead of 2)
Well, I must say a great list. And being related to UK, not really the list I would made, since experience in my country was quite different. Like there was no BBCs. Well maybe a dozen in all.
But I agree, it always seemed like hell of the computer.
I hated BBC mostly because I had to peek&poke in Basic my computer had (because of that cheap,cheap bastard that made Gates so angry on anything C= afterwards ).
It was so bad that I later bought Simon's Basic to be able to draw some 3D staff for my final project in school. Never had a floppy, so my word processor texts were saved on tape. Yay
But games... oh boy, those were just great.
I think Commodore was at least two years late with C128D (it was original idea, not the one without disk drive), cause that was a great machine.
I suppose Atari ST/Amiga came too late to be considered. But what about Amstrad 6128?
Really love your ch and content. The in depth dives into retro computer content is 2nd to none. Thank you so much for your hard work. Happy holidays to you and your family.
You show a 4 instead of 2 for the C64
So the criteria was "better than the 286" and faster than the cray?. So you are stuck with an amiga then?
Where on earth did you find a BBC without the voice expansion chip hole punched through?😮
Commodore 64 sold in millions, got 2nd place, BBC Micro was completely unknown in europe and sold "reasonable well" - and this got 1st place??? Only on your island, dude, only on that island... 🤣 I wuold say, the C64 was over the top! You could do gaming, but also serious stuff with controlling relais, using it as a weather-station and so much more!
Listicle sounds too much like something that means bollocks
What, no Nascom 2? Just kidding, your list is hard to argue against given the boundaries. Now make one for the following 5 years. That would be a lot more contentious I think.
There is no #2, there is second #4 :D
4:56 I think you mixed here zx80 and zx81 wich flickered only in FAST mode.
Also is not the RAM access problem, all 8bits of that era had this problem... But in ZX80, ZX81 CPU literaly generated video, so could flicker (Zx80) or be 4 times slower and don't (zx81 in SLOW mode ). Also suggesting that some one could blind type on zx81 or zx spectrum due to keyboard modes is ridiculous;)
ZX81 membranes after some use tend to develeop dimples so if you were stubborn and patient enough you could start blind typing 🤣
"let you computer become a PC", stop parroting that a PC had to run M$ to be a personal computer, IE: PC
Why 2 number 4 slots?
TRS 80, as in Tandy Radio Shack. TSR is Terminate Stay Resident.
The Electron was absolutely awful. Without mode 7, 32k was not enough memory. It was really slow and the sound was one channel. It had to be given away at massively discounted prices that bankrupted Acorn. The only good thing about it was the keyboard
@@JesterEric Tell me you never used an eletron without telling me you never used an electron. Also we know why Acorn went bust and need to be bailed out by olivettie, as there is a rather well known study conducted at the time. It mostly boils down to massive overspend on the ABC with never made it to production. Acorn management's lack of understating as to how shipping from East Asia worked, and the nature of sale or return.
@@RetroBytesUKThe ABC did make it into production (at least the 110 and cambridge workstation), but was hugely unsuccessful due to high price and the fact that a 110 was basically a bbc b+, copro and harddrive.
@cruxinc We got the Cambridge workstation, which seamed to be the answer to the question, what do we do with the prototypes
You have an editing error you need to rectify :
C64 should be #1 👍🏼
TSR80 or TRS80?
Number 4[1] = Number 2