Re: Cheers Sir Clive
For the first computing products, the ZX80, 81 and Spectrum, floppy disk drives were just a dream for the home user.
I added the floppy disk controller and a single TEAC double sided 80 track floppy to my BBC micro, and it cost nearly as much as the BBC itself (I think that the drive cost £199, and the 8271 and other support chips cost me about £120 to have fitted).
The only systems at the time that had floppies were the VIC20/C64, which used a drive that included as much processing power (another 6502 processor) as the system itself, and at least in the UK was hugely expensive.
Of course, you could get an Apple ][ or a Pet, but again the prices were eye-watering. And when the IBM PC was launched in the UK only slightly later than the Spectrum, a system with 64K of memory, a single 360K floppy disk, a mono text only display board and an IBM monitor cost about £2500.
Sinclair did try to break this high cost of rapid storage for the Spectrum with the Microdrive and Interface 1, but this was one of his one-step-to-far products where the corners cut were just too much. But ICL actually managed to make them reliable in their OPD product, surprisingly.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
