Slice of Pi?

Give it six months. Probably a year for a price drop. I'm interested to see what people end up actually doing with them (assuming the majority don't just end up thrown in a cupboard within a month).

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules Richardson
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It's a long time ago and I don't remember them being that expensive unless you are comparing them to inferior products such as those from Sinclair.

Reply to
Mark

I must have personally spent a grand total of about £1600 back then on BBC Micro related stuff, from 1982.

Even went as crazy to purchase Hard Drives and a 80186 coprocessor for the Master to run GEM and DOS+ (iirc), only to give up and find a second hand 12MHz 80286 PC to run it faster at a higher resolution than CGA.

Wasn't that much into games. Writing utilities, terminal emulators, breaking and inventing silly copy protection schemes was much more fun.

Reply to
Adrian C

The sinclair products are/were only inferior if you already had a Beeb. If you couldn't afford the beeb at £400, then the Sinclairs at less than half that price were very attractive for home use.

I was working when the Beebs were being sold to schools, so I could afford one (just!) but I couldn't afford the disks or colour monitor initially - had an old B/W portable I used! (Although I did very quickly get a set of disk drives for it)

And here's another little gem a friend of mine (who restores spectrums as a hobby) just pointed out: The recent 1-day 30-year anniversary of the Beeb was reassuringly expensive (£78) while the upcoming 30-year Spectrum event is over 3 days and free!

Gordon

Reply to
Gordon Henderson

The Spectrum had more RAM, and was 175 quid vs 400 quid - and it dropped in price faster.

and didn't use quite as much of it on display either. Ok, the B+ sorted that, but that was late to the game.

(we had a BBC, and I still reckon it was pretty good for the time. A disk drive and proper printer interface were the key to making it useful, and Spectrums never got anything that good. Microdrives never caught on, the Sinclair printer was a comic joke, and anything else was tiny market. And it got Elite first, which was the most important bit at the time.)

How much were C64s? I didn't know anybody with one, but I understand in some regions they were popular.

Reply to
Clive George

If they worked. I had several ZX8* and they all failed to work properly and were sent back. The spectrum was better but was still prone to overheating. The beeb just worked. IIRC it was about £250 but it's a long time ago.

I used an old B&W TV and stuck to tapes for quite a long time. Eventually I saved up for a floppy disk drive!

Reply to
Mark

My first computer was an Advance 86. Anyone remember them?

Reply to
Bob Eager

Mastery of understatement... ;-)

(one of (if not) the best selling computer models of all time)

Launched in the states at just under $600 but fell quite quickly. Much of the time in the UK they were in the £200 - £300 range before falling toward the end of their reign. They outsold the beeb by quite a multiple here, and had a much wider range of available software.

Reply to
John Rumm

I had rivalry with my room mate in college. On my side of the room, a BBC Micro. On his side, a Commodore 64.

Much mickey taking comparing the tortoise speed of his disc drive and the rawness of the BASIC against mine. However points lost as his loaded Elite and played the Blue Danube while doing so. Music on the C64 was especially impressive (for the time).

Playground, indeed :)

Reply to
Adrian C

This lady gave herself an interesting project.

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one of those 64-DTVs somewhere...

Reply to
Adrian C

Agreed; it was a lot more money when all most kids wanted to do was push a few pixels around the screen and maybe get into some programming - all of which could be done just as easily on less costly hardware. When it came to expansion, the beeb ruled - but the core system was somewhat memory-starved and lacking in horsepower (if only it had been built around a Z80 and with 64K as standard! :-)

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules Richardson

As of January 1982, £235 for a model A, £335 for a model B, and £135 to upgrade an existing A to B-spec. £105 for a mono monitor, £288 for colour (likely a Cub). Speculation that a Prestel and Teletext adapter* would be about £120 each when available, circa £50 for Econet, under £500 for dual floppy drives, and under £300 for a Z80 copro.

  • also speculation of a combined unit being made available; to my knowledge, that never happened even in prototype form.

As of January 1983, a Z80 copro was £295 (so they were right in their estimate), as was a 6502 copro. 32016 copro price was estimated at around £600 (but I don't believe Acorn ever sold any - the few that made it into the wild were all loan/test/demo units)

For comparison, a ZX81 was £70 in Jan '82, and £150 would get you a pre- built Atom (£30 less for a kit), with £299 more for a floppy drive to go with it.

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules Richardson

Oh, right after posting I found a few more beeb-related (ex-VAT) prices (these have been stamped by Acorn with a big "confidential" stamp) from what seems to be the first quarter of '83:

£300 for a model A with Econet, £389 for a model B with Econet, £450 for a model B with Econet and disk drive, £230 for a single-sided 40t disk drive, £799 for dual, double-sided 80t disk drive

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules Richardson

IIRC the 2MHz 6502 in the BBC was somewhat faster in practice than the

3.5 Mhz Z80 in the Spectrum. The C64 only had a 1MHz 6510.

Memory and price were the biggest problems.

Reply to
Clive George

VAT-exclusive prices? The A was 300, the B 400 quid for quite a while.

Cambridge uni had a collection of 32016 copros we did fortran on, but that might not count as the wild.

I remember the ZX81 being 100 quid + 30 quid for the ram pack when it came out. It got rather cheaper as time went on.

Reply to
Clive George

I had a 32016 (or was it 16032) co processor. I bought it at an auction of liquidated shop-stock, so it was certianly in some shops...

Gordon

Reply to
Gordon Henderson

No but I remember in ~1979 making a card-frame, wire wrapping the backplane and building a Nascom 1 on verocards for it. Must've been out of my tiny mind. Worked tho.

Reply to
brass monkey

My first wire wrapping was in 1972, on the CPU backplane of a Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer. I added some extra cards to spare slots, and rewired/enhanced the backplane with much wiring. The result was to modify the actions of some instructions, and also add some new ones!

Oh, the Advance 86:

formatting link

Reply to
Bob Eager

Nascom :D

Reply to
brass monkey

The A/B ones are quoted as being inclusive, so I assume the other ones are too as they're mentioned in the same article (Practical Computing, vol 5, iss. 1)

I think Acorn were using them as a test site though; my guess is that no money ever changed hands for them - ditto with the ACWs that they had. Another uni had a bunch, too, but I can't remember which one now (but possibly York or Edinburgh).

A good portion (maybe all) of the Cambridge ones ended up in a skip a few years ago, incidentally - I was contacted out of the blue by someone who had rescued them. I think I ended up with seven of them (several of which went straight off to good homes) - I've still got one or two.

And it came out repeatedly, usually at the most inopportune of moments ;-)

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules Richardson

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