I was 5 years old in 1983, yet I've owned and used 5 of those pieces of history.
MEGAGRAPH: 1983's UK home computer chart toppers
How popular - relatively speaking - was your early 1980s home computer? Thanks to some old chart data, we can tell you. Back in the day - 1983, to be precise - VNU Business Publications’ launched Personal Computer News, a glossy magazine pitched against the weekly incumbent, Sunshine’s newsprint Popular Computing Weekly. A …
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 16:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: @-tim
You are missing something: in essence the world has not changed: Still nasty little civil wars all over the place, still crime, still yoof thinking it knows it all and age thinking as it always thought. Still greedy financiers and corruption; still we all thinking how much more modern and clever we are.
Well, some things change in degree: financial crises and comms. foul ups seem to happen faster and be deeper; a lot more species are extinct and a lot more of Europe, especially Britain, overbuilt. The "designer drugs" seem to be nastier and the educational level lower.
So, just what do you think computers have really changed? Perhaps you entertain yourself a little more on your own, with just a computer game and a mobile 'phone to pretend you know people. Have they changed the local football or rugby or cricket game at the local, truly amateur level? They've made it a bit easier to tell someone you're late and on your way, or not, replaced a few stuntment. Perhaps online news sources are taking up some of the readership from newspapers. But then we said the same about television, radio, teletext. They've created a lot of mainly boring, semi-skilled jobs masquerading as highly technical, interesting work (just read some of the pseudo-technical babble on this website to see how low skilled most of the people are). I grant that in Health they have provided some excellent and powerful new tools. But as there are increasingly too many people and too few resources, this is a dubious benefit.
Cars still kill in the hands of drunks. Aeroplanes still crash. People are born, eat, die much as before. Fundamentally, what has really, really changed, underneath all the puffery? If it has, is it for the better for the majority or has it condemned a lot of people to a new kind of drudgery and stress?
It COULD do wonderful things. In a few fields it has. In most, it has rather taken the fun out of life and made it even easier to be unpleasantly, socially incompetent, creating more excuses for idleness and stupidity - "Well, it's in the computer...".
Really, mankind (sorry, humandkind) has not changed, just the Western self perception.
I write this as one who carries the latest mobile 'phone, works on computers, has one at home, takes a running watch to measure his speed, monitor his heartbeat ..., does some online shopping. But in the end, nothing has changed, apart from a bag full of electronic accessories and chargers dragging me down whenever I travel and a lot more furious frustration.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 19:30 GMT Derk
Re Re: @-tim
Couldn't agree more. Things have changed but not always for the better. I used to do PCB designs with a lightbox, scalpel and tapes/transfers. Took a few weeks to do a double sided board, my letters were written by typists and we all went home at 5pm. Now customers expect the same sort of board in 24-48 hours. More productive? perhaps, but now I'm the typist too. Computers promised so much more leisure time, and for some it has, as unemployed folk LOL. My lardy ass now sits in front of a screen for 8 hours, and I have to make time for exercise. Must be getting old, but I preferred the slower pace of life, civility and time to think.
I'll get me coat and piss off to the past....
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Friday 4th January 2013 00:15 GMT CmdrX3
Re: @-tim
Depressingly sad comment... and sadly also depressingly true.
Now if you will excuse me, I have to go and play online poker with all my friends.... they really are my friends... honestly.... they care a lot about me and I about them....... what are the names of their wives and children..... I really never thought to ask.
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Saturday 5th January 2013 13:49 GMT Unicornpiss
Re: @-tim
Well, did you expect humanity to change? The human brain (the first and still most powerful computer) is hardwired the same as it has always been. Some of us may have less flaky firmware and a better database than others, but human emotions and motivations are unchanged.
Computers have, however improved life in myriad ways. You mentioned entertainment, but here are some things you totally missed:
Up until about 1995, if you needed to research something, you'd be poring through out-of-date encyclopedias in a library, and maybe finding one or two sources for probably incomplete information. With the internet, there are a lot of sources, and certainly some inaccuracies, but the sum of knowledge has never been more accessible to all than now. What about locating your long lost family member/adopted brother/first girlfriend in 1970? Hire a private eye? Research the dusty stacks at the library?
What about staying in touch with friends and family that live far away? An expensive long-distance phone call in 1935-1995, a heartfelt letter written and received infrequently prior to that.
How about transportation? Cars prior to about 1985 used carburetors. Remember starting a cold car with a malfunctioning carburetor? If I'm behind a carbureted car, I can smell the difference--surely it's better that we're driving more fuel-efficient, less polluting vehicles, to say nothing of the added power and safety.
Engineering? Being able to design, test, and rapid-prototype anything as opposed to the laborious design processes of yesteryear.
Medicine? We've mapped the human genome. We understand how proteins interact. We've created 'smart drugs', we have CT and MRI scanners.
I could go on, but hopefully I've made my point.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 12:14 GMT Ian Michael Gumby
Funny...
I had been programming for 5 years by then.
I started with an Ohio Scientific C3A, and a PDP 1134 in school. RSTS not Vaxen in a public high school.
In the fall of '83, I was working in a small computer store where I had access to Grid, Kaypro, Osbourne, and other desktop PCs that were great for running Visicalc. and Word Processing software. I would have been one of the first kids to hand in school reports typewritten on a dot matrix printer, except that I had a Daisywheel printer.
Ah yes, those were the days when the 64 in a computer name meant 64K of Ram, not the size of the word. ;-)
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 21:43 GMT Irongut
Re: Funny...
"Ah yes, those were the days when the 64 in a computer name meant 64K of Ram, not the size of the word. ;-)"
Except it didn't. It meant the size of the memory, including both RAM and ROM. So the 48K Spectrum had 41K of RAM and the Commodore 64 had 30 something. A fact Commodore owners never liked to hear.
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Friday 4th January 2013 09:43 GMT Nick Ryan
Re: Funny...
Wrong. The Commodore 64 did have 64k of RAM. If you knew what you were doing you could access all of it somehow, but as many processor functions were mapped into RAM you had to be careful.
What it did have though, was two 8k ROMs mapped into a couple of high segments of this memory, the memory in these was usable if you didn't want to use the functions available in the BASIC ROM or the SYSTEM ROM as you could switch either of both of these ROMs out and access the RAM "underneath". The 38911 (from memory, so probably wrong) bytes free message when the system initially starts is the amount of free, contiguous, bytes available to Commodore (Microsoft) Basic when storing programs and basic data. Due to where the ROM images were mapped in memory space and the default display memory mapping the largest available contiguous RAM block for Basic to use was much smaller than it could have been. The non-contiguous memory was still usable by Basic, just not directly. For example it was often used to store data, graphics or to store assembly / machine code.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 16:39 GMT Nick Ryan
With a bit of luck this article and graph can be flung at some of the writers here at El Reg who seem intent to rewrite history with Apple being in any way relevant at this time. Sure, the IIe was a little more popular in the US but why attempt to use the US figures when talking about Global, European and in particular UK markets at the time?
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 16:40 GMT Christian Berger
Re: A technical question
Not that I'd say that Gnuplot is the right tool for the job, but it does choose different colours and point styles by default.
Other than that, I'm not sure how that data would be displayed properly. I would have gone for stacked graphs each one representing the sales number. You wouldn't have gotten the "ranking", but you would have gotten the relative amounts. Seriously few people care if the one being sold 132 or 134 times is the highest ranking one, they both sold pretty well.
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Friday 4th January 2013 13:43 GMT John H Woods
Re: A technical question
This has got to be the worst graph I have seen for a while, will add to my collection of 'how not to present information'. The raw table with the sales figures would have been vastly better, and whenever raw data is easier to interpret than a given visualization, the visualization is a total waste of time.
"Crunched the figures" -- yes, virtually to oblivion. Publish the figures, and a dozen commentards will provide you with better graphs.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 13:06 GMT Simon Harris
Re: Worst. Graph. Ever.
Date confusion? Doesn't help that the first two date codes on the horizontal axis seem to overlay (9-23/7 and 7-21/7) - should the first be 9-23/6 ? )
Although it doesn't help with the late entries, read the table at the bottom line by line from left to right for initial positions, so the Spectrum starts at 1, Dragon 32 at 2, Atari 400 at 7, Commodore 64 at 13, etc.
As these are from sales charts, I'm quite surprised to see that anyone was still selling Atoms (22 in the chart) in the second half of 2003, 18 months or so after the BBC had appeared - got my Atom in the autumn of 1980.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 15:56 GMT VinceH
Re: wow
"Worst graph I've ever seen. It would have been too much trouble to put the names next to their starting position on the left and then you can trace them through."
If you click on the graph, you'll see - true to the caption underneath that says "Click for a larger, easier to read version" - that's exactly what you'll get.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 11:53 GMT Colin Critch
Still have my Dragon32
I Still have my Dragon32 and a DASM cartridge in a cupboard somewhere. I liked the 6809 stuff back then in my teens. I bet it still works though finding a working tape deck will be more problematic. You could speed up the CPU but loose the video with a simple asm write or poke.
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Sunday 6th January 2013 02:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
CPC
Indeed. The CPC wasn't publicly launched until April 1984 with it being a couple more months before it actually hit the shops.
Buy the time you get into 1985/86 the order of things was 1 - Spectrum, 2 - C64, 3 - CPC. Wasn't a bad result for Amstrad either as not only was the CPC very profitable thanks to its higher price, but by mid '86 they'd also bought out Sinclair which they started to make money on almost straight away. Rumour has it they made their money back just by flogging the huge amounts of stock Sinclair had stuck in warehouses.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 13:56 GMT Christine Hedley
"It seems to be missing the commodore +4 and it's baby brother the commodore 16"
Didn't they appear a bit later? I remember reading a magazine review of a couple of new Commodore models in the autumn of 1984, which I assume is when they were launched (in the UK, at least); if I recall (my memory is hazy) the review was of those two machines. I don't think they ever sold in large numbers though, the home computer market seemed to be increasingly dominated by the usual suspects like the Spectrum and C64 by that point.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 14:26 GMT Dave 126
Re: hard to read
I have a 1983 Hamley's toyshop catalogue floating around... [performs quick search to see if someone else has gone to the effort of scanning it in... and Bingo! Thanks to be to that person]
Here it is:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.286052674747808.73189.273368722682870&type=1
The games consoles are near the bottom of the page, click a thumbnail for a larger picture. What I got from it was the how much the dedicated chess-playing boards were compared to the more general gaming machines.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 12:12 GMT b166er
Graph was plotted on a Speccy, that's the problem you see, not enough colours!
Man I loved my Spectrum, spent most of Xmas that year writing code to do firework displays on the TV, whilst simultaneously playing classical Xmas music. Wish I could find that code now, it must have sounded awful!
There's a free Raspberry Pi education manual now available for budding programmers. Has good Scratch and Python sections so far.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 12:43 GMT Anonymous South African Coward
48k Speccy
Also had one of these, and it was good :)
Great to see it was the favourite in 1983, although the chart (and its myriad colors) is a bit hard to follow. Maybe something interactive (a graph which "lights" up when you hover (or mousturbates) your mouse over a certain computer...
Is it possible to plot the demise of a couple of these favourites all the way from 1983 up until 1988?
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 13:16 GMT Mostly_Harmless
Here's a sobering thought...
Out of curiosity, I viewed the image info for that graph...it's over 190KB....way bigger than the RAM on any of the machines referenced in the graph itself.
Possibly a commentary on how complicated the graph is, but sadly I suspect it says more about how profligate we've become in our attitude towards memory and resources.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 17:01 GMT Simon Harris
Re: Here's a sobering thought...
On a related note...
David Braben's hit his Kickstarter target to start writing the new version of Elite. Bet it won't run in 20K on a BBC B though!
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 14:03 GMT greenawayr
Was I the only one...
...who had, and indeed, heard of, the Mitsubushi MSX? Not sure what year it was released but it couldn't have been much after this.
El Reg, must contain one other person to have come across this beast that could work with both Tapes and Cartridges (instant loading technology, none of this 30 minutes waiting for the tape to load and then crash business).
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 14:31 GMT PaulyV
Re: Was I the only one...
Ah, the MSX vision of all computers running similar hardware and being compatible - what a vision with no future that was (there's no emoticon for sarcasm is there?)...
Being a Paul Hardcastle wannabe I had something called a Yamaha CX5m which would have been very similar to your Mistubishi, but was specifically made by Yamaha to run music programs and voice cartridges. Came with a natty little 4 octave keyboard.
I also seem to remember there was an MSX made by Panasonic (I think) which had a built in genlock to overlay video onto the screen.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 14:37 GMT Dave 126
Re: Was I the only one...
There were a few MSX machines made by different companies - it was a standard. The first Metal Gear game by Konami was for the MSX2 platform
In the image below, from the 1983 Hamley's catalogue, the bottom right machine is a Sord M5 Computer, fairly similar to MSX spec:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=286058214747254&set=a.286052674747808.73189.273368722682870&type=3&theater
The Commodore Vic 20 is probably the more famous machine to work with both tapes and cartridges.
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 14:54 GMT SuperHoopMango
Re: Was I the only one...
Ahhhhh..... The Commodore Vic 20.... My introduction to the world of computers!
Whack that 8kb memory cartridge in the back, and load up some MAMMOTH games! (Ok, not really mammoth, but that's how it seemed to a 14 year old boy!)
OR....
Whack in your games cartridge and play a text based adventure.... I can't for the life of me remember what it was called...but I do remember calling my Dad to witness my completion of it!!
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 16:38 GMT greenawayr
Re: Was I the only one...
I had one cartridge for my MSX, Formula 1 Spirit. At the time I was in awe of the graphics and the instant loading.
Once I had that cartridge I found it difficult to wait 20 minutes for Chuckie Egg to load.
I still had the MSX till a few years ago. The power button was always a little tempermental, but it had truly given up the ghost. It may still be in the old man's attic somewhere.
Simpler times.
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Friday 4th January 2013 09:19 GMT Dr_N
Re: Was I the only one...
"Whack in your games cartridge and play a text based adventure.... I can't for the life of me remember what it was called."
I had the Pirate's Cove Adventure for the VIC20, as well as the superb Jelly Monsters.
The Super Expander 3K RAM (+ additional graphics) cartridge was the pinnacle of my VIC20 set-up...
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 14:21 GMT Matt Bridge-Wilkinson
My atari was broken
I recall getting an Atari 600 or 800 XL for Christmas some time around the mid eighties, It had a RAM problem where half its 64k was missing, 2 swapped units later we gave up and I ended up with an Acorn electron instead. Have to wonder how much the quality problems held atari back in the home computer arena.
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Monday 7th January 2013 13:17 GMT TkH11
Re: My atari was broken
I had both (and still have one of them somewhere) a 600XL and an 800XL never had any problems with them at all. I did have a problem with the cassette player: Atari 1010 (if I recall!), the buttons were quite weak and one of them broke, got that replaced no problem (from Argos I think).
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Thursday 3rd January 2013 21:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
1983 was a little early for the C64. I got mine in 1984 and there still wasn't many great games around. By 1985 it was better and when Zzap64 came out it was booming.
If you didn't own a C64 you probably wouldn't have known about it's great strength, the music. Now if Commodore had been run a bit better the graphics might have been better too. The tricks the Atari machines could do were pretty good, the whole colour gradients which make the C64 graphics look a bit drab.
It's no surprise that Jay Miner did the Amiga chips as he used the same sort of colour gradient tricks there, the "copper" effect as they called it. Varying colours over each scanline.
The speccy was an example of engineering to a very low cost, but something that crippled later developments IMHO. Even the Atari ST didn't have a very good sound chip compared to the C64 and Amiga. The same awful sound chip was used in the later +2 and +3 speccy.
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Friday 4th January 2013 02:23 GMT southpacificpom
Acorn
I started with an Acorn Atom which I built from a kitset then moved later to a BBC Micro B when I could afford the 400 quid asking price. I hated Yank computers and considered Spectrums as toys, Acorn computers were the best IMHO.
I still believe the computer world would have been far more advanced now under the influence of Hauser & Curry than the mess which has evolved under Gates & Ballmer.
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Friday 4th January 2013 08:51 GMT Ian 49
C64 user here
And despite being in my final year at primary school, I spent more time doing computer support for the completely computer illiterate school staff on the three trolley-mounted BBCs than I did learning anything.
I've spent the rest of my life trying to fix peoples' problems with computers. It's getting old now.
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Monday 7th January 2013 13:22 GMT TkH11
Re: I had
I remember spending ages thinking about what computer to buy, I was using an Apple 2 at the time, and wanted something better for games, but I wanted to be able to program on it too. I liked the 6502 processor better than the Z80 so a pre-requisite for me was a 6502 based machine, the BBC micro didn't come out until a bit later. I chose the Atari 800XL and never regretted it. Graphics and sound were really quite impressive, the way the graphics chip handled display list instructions, mixing of various modes and lots of clever effects could be achieved was very impressive. Sound was good, being multi-channel and being Atari, a good selection games for it and it had a proper keyboard, something which the Spectrum and many of the Sinclair models lacked.
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Friday 4th January 2013 10:35 GMT MikeCorris
Happy Days...
I got a 16k Spectrum for My birthday (or Christmas) in '83. I still remember the fist command I issued to it. Border 2. Amazing! I later persuaded my dad to fork out for an upgrade to 48k which entailed sending it back to Sinclair, but once I got it back I could play my mate's ripped off copy of Manic Miner!
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Friday 4th January 2013 20:39 GMT Narg
I never understood why the Commodore was so popular. It really was one of the worst of all these computers, and I've owned almost all of them. My favorite was never even on this chart, the Atari 1200xl. SO much more capable than the Commodore it wasn't even funny. Commodore only became good after Trammel left Atari and made the Commodore Amiga.
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Saturday 5th January 2013 19:57 GMT Jim 59
Interesting graph
What the graph shows is the rapid churn in the market at that time, and that individual models dominated for short peaks of time. My beloved Dragon 32 was dominant in its heyday, but that lasted less than a year, before the market moved on.
This agrees more closely with my own recollection of the time, and contradicts the belief that a few machines topped the charts for virtually the whole 8 bit era. It was more exciting and fast moving than that. Your memory of the most popular computer depends on whether you are now 45 years old or 44 and a half, for example.