Best Home Computer From The 1980S?

[TTG]

Hi all. I've managed to get my BBC micro up and running. What was everyones (of a certain age lol) favourite home computer from the 1980s? I loved creating my own games as well as playing them. The BBCs excellent Basic programming language made game creation great fun. It was also fast as I never got round to learning machine code. Happy memories!

[CrapAtCryptics]

Texas Ti994a not much memory but very easy to code. Work saved to a music cassette.

[Prudie]

Definitely my BBC B. I loved it and also became quite a dab hand at programming in basic especially for solving certain types of the Sunday Times brainteaser - plus of course loading all those games on a cassette recorder with the associated noise.

[Togo]

The Commadore 64 and Sinclair's SpectrumZX were a big part of the start for some of us. There was always one in bits on a workbench in the workshops of the company I worked for in electronics repairs. We hardly got a tap done after we repaired and "tested" one.

[Quoi]

I loved my commodore c64 - still got it and the box it came in £199 lol. I loved the basic programming an the floppy disc and printer it had.
I wrote a c64 version of the game Yahtzee and had it reveiwed by a magazine of the time.

[Togo]

If that is a c64gs Quoi they are quite rare.... particularly boxed.

[Togo]

As is the SX64.... Have a look.

http://www.retrogamingcollector.com/Retro-Gaming-Price-Guide-C.html

[Quoi]

sadly £20 for mine Togo thanks

[Buenchico]

The school I taught at used BBC Model B computers, networked by a server. I certainly enjoyed playing around with them.

However my first home computer was an Atari 1040 ST. When purchased with some peripherals (such as a games joystick, which I never used), it cost me about £200 from a franchise operating within Selfridges. However I then paid about £250 to buy a single DTP program (Pagestream), which came on about a dozen floppy disks. (I later added an external hard drive, with a massive 80Mb of storage).

Interestingly though, I've still not found a single feature in the mighty QuarkXpress (currently requiring 2GB Ram and 2GB minimum disk space) that wasn't available in Pagestream (on a dozen floppies and running on 1Mb RAM).

[Cloverjo]

The Speccy, of course! I've still got mine even though it's falling to bits. Can't get rid of it.
I loved Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy.
We used BBC things at school.

[Prudie]

Funnily enough the BBC B was my own home computer but when I had to start the first computing CSE course at my school we had the RM 380Z. That was clunky.

[bednobs]

we had the zx81. it had 1 k of memory iirc, and you could get a 16 k extension if you were posh

[Arksided]

Atari xl for games and think that Amiga at the time had the best music programmes to compose your own stuff.

[woofgang]

we had a Beeb master then an Epson, then an IBM. Can't remember all the brands of windows machines we had.....have been all mac for about 9 years now.

[woofgang]

no! I forgot before the beeb we had a Dragon32

[Old_Geezer]

Too long ago to recall what was from what decade; but about that time I had an Atari, and when that failed, bought an Amiga with !!! a hard disk ! Enjoyed both.

[RobNorth]

In the early '80s the firm I worked for replaced all of the dumb terminal keyboards with BBC B models which gave some advantage not apparent to the users. A couple of years later they gave them away to schools and replaced them with Ataris which gave the user some independence from the mainframe for spreadsheets and other stuff. One of the main reasons for the move to BBC B's was that at the time they cost considerably less than a "computer keyboard"

[TTG]

All great answers, brought back some great memories as friends had some of the computers mentioned. I've also managed to find a box of old floppy disks (remember them). Need to get another disk drive as my original one gave up many years ago.

[Hopkirk]

I played with my flatmates Sinclair Spectrum a few times.

It was a right faff to do anything.

I honestly thought it was a pointless waste of time, couldn't see what possible use a home computer could be, and expected it to be a passing fad.

[Tilly2]

I didn't have a home computer until well into the 90's but the schools I worked in all used BBC Model B computers.

I think Bedfordshire bought a job lot. :-)