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Well you pays your cookie and you takes your crumble. Compared to the Amiga's glittering, star-studded launch, the Electron's seemed proportionately right.

But what did the Elk offer? Acorn only took most of the best bits from the BBC Micro and sold the remainder as the economy value pack.

I can't find a Dragon's Claw to get us back on topic.

But here's a piece of Dragon self-unawareness.....

Dragon 32: There's only one thing harder than building a great computer. Building software to match.

I'm more than aware of that, mind you. In Britain, it took no less a giant than Churchill himself to come back to power with his party to hammer down that bit of organised government planning, which also included the public being on half the wartime food ration that they had ten years after Hitler i...

I think Spain just really really didn't like Commodore or Apple. It appears that a Spanish electronics place persuaded their government to go all Trump and impose import tarriffs on foreign equipment, which was then rather sharply curtailed after powerful lobbying from manufacturers of that equipme...

The BBC/government in the early 1980's understood something some computer companies didn't, the importance of standardisation. I didn't do GCSE Computer Studies (or O levels as they were back in the early 80's) but I can imagine the misery schools and exam boards would have if there hadn't been sta...

Of course, the Dragon limped on for a few more years in Spain, while Sinclair had a go with a Spanish machine and the Amstrad CPC ended up king of the hill there. I can easily imagine how Spain looked a land of promise in 1984-85, with a saturated British market standing in stark contrast to the com...

Ebay, m'good friend: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Compaq-Contura-4-25c-Laptop-Computer-Vintage-in-good-clean-order-Spares-Repairs/323795595157?hash=item4b63b8af95:g:Th4AAOSw6ttcyvd- https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Vintage-Compaq-Contura-4-25-Laptop-Computer-2820D-Series/173893204868?hash=item287cd7bb84:g:F...

That's a sweet idea. Though is there any benefit over selling on Ebay?

Nice to see a game called Richochet as the featured on the home page, with video. I never expected something as fast and polished on the Electron. Bit too fast for me though.

Isn't the software obsession akin to rare record collecting? That makes things a bit more understandable. I've bought a nice few boxed things and they've made my micros feel all the more golden but never for really silly money. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/The-BEATLES-Please-Please-Me-MONO-Black-Gold-...

Not if someone buys it. :lol Indeed. You can get a 'real' BBC for that money, nicely refurbed and upgraded. Does this Epson PC look a reasonable collector's price? I'd say on the edge of probably not: https://www.ebay.com/itm/EPSON-Q301A-PCE-PC-COMPUTER-PORTABLE-VINTAGE-RARE-Q301A-VC1/264286131554?...

The C64 also had analogue pins in its two joystick ports. Must have been in the VIC 20 too.

They WERE good decks. When I was given my hand-me-down Electron, the tape deck was almost one of a kind. The same reliability I came to expect with the proprietary CBM tape decks. (Amazing reliability with the CBM units, actually, when you feel how light and flimsy they seem, especially when you ope...

Er, Boots would of sold proper computer tape recorders :lol: I must admit I looked at those and and scoffed, as I'd recognise so many as rebadged or repurposed regular mono cassette decks. Even the Acorn one. Though much as the Dragon was holed under the waterline by design, it's truly fascinating ...

Look the Dragon wasn't perfect, no machine was not even the Beeb, and there are some valid criticisms to be made but please try and do so based on the actual hardware / software capabilities rather than general impressions. Is it only a general impression that the Dragon seemed more susceptible to ...

It doesn't even seem Spectrum-level but it was sold for twice the price.

Reading the magazines, they dish out funny little techie tips. To avoid feedback ruining loads and saves, users had to remove the Mic and Ear cables alternately.

And here it is all refined, with violins and piano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qOl2qT_8ho

Just to show it done.

Just a mo', the BBC wasn't widescreen and the picture doesn't look stretched.

How did you get this?

Seems more than Sinclair felt left in the cold and took comfort in bellyaching that the Conservative government weren't putting computers in schools fast enough, without enough of a software spread and freezing out Acorn's competition. Well to quote Yes Minister , Rome wasn't built in a day and in a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtJCyOQsoag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtJCyOQsoag I think this sounds pretty good, even before taking the actual MIDI and running it through whatever. Just thought you might be interested. http://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/tumblr_...

Bonkers!

Well it all looks like it worked out as well as it was ever going to. Though I notice nobody wanted the change which Your Computer wanted in 1982 - for BBC Television to commit ratings suicide and have The Computer Programme use micros as scientific aversion therapy. Well played sirs. Very well play...

Would those changes have pushed the prices up? Schools needed enough cash incentive to splash out on a BBC as it was.

Maybe. But I still think even in the case of having nothing to reply to, there was nothing in the answer to tell us what the 64 or BBC could actually do or how. All the same, check out the Herman Hauser interview from 1982 and how he's really over-egging the Electron: http://www.retro8bitcomputers.c...

In the shop at the moment.

They don't often go back to the 80s but there's quite an interesting spread there to start off a young retro newbie in the mainstream things.

Some of these pictures shouldn't be sideways but stuff it.

February '83 carries a rather fence-sitting letter on whether to buy a BBC or a Commodore 64. I'd venture that because the machines were in their opening months, not enough utilities were out to fully exploit unique capabilities. http://www.retro8bitcomputers.co.uk/Content/downloads/magazines/yourco...

With our lord Chris Serle on the cover, a topless Beeb, the Kenneth Baker interview and interesting mentions of 'floppy tape', I'm surprised we don't have a permanent hotlink to this very January 1982 issue here at Stardot. http://www.retro8bitcomputers.co.uk/Content/downloads/magazines/yourcomputer...

That's currently?

That's pretty damn special.

It's a fascinating retro machine, as are many of the failures. The QL didn't even allow for a built-in hard drive (though Tezza's Classic Computer Collection uses a plug-in floppy drive) and wasn't IBM compatible but I like the look of its 80 column mode, its games and the idea that it could have be...

I know there was a plant at Dundee which made the Spectrums (Spectrii?) but I wasn't aware that a substantial number of other firms were contracted. All this helps explain the variation. Though the QL being well designed for business use, with a decent disk drive and keyboard? Really? It was cheap f...

No but I did recrust some bread in it for its maiden voyage.