Over the in the other significant English-speaking economy, we were a lot poorer in the early 1980s, and as such, anything priced in US$ was too expensive.
So things like Atari 8-bits didn't sell well here. In fact only the budget C64 did, and it was an expensive machine in early-1980s Britain.
Which was a good thing, because it encouraged a flourishing local market in locally-made computers.
Although the C64 sold in the millions, and so is familiar to many, Sinclair's ZX Spectrum was even more common over here. And although we didn't know it back then, it was huge behind the Iron Curtain too, in the form of dozens and dozens of unauthorized clones. Every Communist nation had its own ZX Spectrum clone, or maybe several. Some adapted to display Cyrillic, some built from imported bits and some from Soviet bits, some with discrete logic in place of Sinclair Research's ULA.
And all of the Euromicros had better BASICs than the C64.
Sinclair BASIC wasn't great but it did graphics and sound. The best was BBC BASIC on the BBC Micro from Acorn. Named procedures, with local variables and recursion. IF...THEN...ELSE, various loop constructs, and inline 6502 assembler.
I reckon it's partly the terrible BASIC of the C64 that turned everyone against the language:
Over the in the other significant English-speaking economy, we were a lot poorer in the early 1980s, and as such, anything priced in US$ was too expensive.
So things like Atari 8-bits didn't sell well here. In fact only the budget C64 did, and it was an expensive machine in early-1980s Britain.
Which was a good thing, because it encouraged a flourishing local market in locally-made computers.
Although the C64 sold in the millions, and so is familiar to many, Sinclair's ZX Spectrum was even more common over here. And although we didn't know it back then, it was huge behind the Iron Curtain too, in the form of dozens and dozens of unauthorized clones. Every Communist nation had its own ZX Spectrum clone, or maybe several. Some adapted to display Cyrillic, some built from imported bits and some from Soviet bits, some with discrete logic in place of Sinclair Research's ULA.
And all of the Euromicros had better BASICs than the C64.
Sinclair BASIC wasn't great but it did graphics and sound. The best was BBC BASIC on the BBC Micro from Acorn. Named procedures, with local variables and recursion. IF...THEN...ELSE, various loop constructs, and inline 6502 assembler.
I reckon it's partly the terrible BASIC of the C64 that turned everyone against the language:
https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/71381.html