BATTLE OF THE 8- BITS
In the 1980s, two home computers ruled the roost
TO SET THE SCENE for the rise of ’80s micro-computers, we need to start with 1977’s Apple II. It was available for the “cheap” price of $1,298 (around $5,370 in today’s money), which bought you a 6502 CPU, 4K of RAM, and six colors—or 16 at very low resolution.
This was a great deal at the time, and was enough to seriously bloody IBM’s nose. Although the hardware wouldn’t change much in this period, costs had to come down drastically for home computing to really take off. Which they did—but the US and British approaches to this economic problem were vastly different.
The ZX Spectrum resulted from the battle of the 8-bit micro scene in early ’80s Britain. Clive Sinclair would kick-start the British micro movement with the first home computer for under $200, 1980’s groundbreaking ZX80. It had only 1K of RAM, a horrid keyboard, and the screen jumped with every keystroke. Nevertheless, it was enough to rouse the public’s interest in home computing, and later resulted in the improved ZX81.
Meanwhile, a bitter rivalry was developing between Sinclair Research and its former employee, Chris Curry, of Acorn Computers. Things got genuinely ugly when the BBC wanted to commission a machine for its computer literacy project and TV series The Computer Programme. Every British manufacturer was putting in bids—including Sinclair—but only Acorn’s design
convinced the BBC. Eventually, an Acorn-built BBC Micro was gifted to every school in Britain, and Clive Sinclair needed to come back with something big.
In the US, home computing was going in more of a big-business direction, with players such as Apple, IBM, Atari, and Texas Instruments. Many machines were running on MOS Technology’s 6502 processor, and Commodore’s Jack Tramiel achieved a major coup by simply buying out MOS Technology. Now that Commodore owned the factory that produced everyone’s chips, it was poised to wage an aggressive expansion campaign that would bludgeon the rest of the market, with the Commodore 64.
POST MORTEM Both the Spectrum and C64 lived well past their use-by dates, and it was only the growing 16-bit market that brought them to an end. Although Sinclair itself folded in the mid-’80s, it was bought out by Amstrad, which kept the Spectrum line going with upgrades such as the 128K model.
By the late ’80s, any pretense that these computers were designed for doing homework had long since disappeared, and both the Speccy and C64 were sold at bargain-basement prices as budget gaming machines. Indeed, Germans could buy a Commodore 64 at Aldi. The ubiquity of the Speccy’s cheap games kept this machine going in the budget market right up until 1992, and more than 50 clones spread across the Soviet Union—some are still being produced in Russia today.
As for the Commodore, there were follow-ups, such as the Commodore 128 (a reasonable success), and failures like the ridiculous Commodore 64 Games system and the bizarre Commodore 65 prototype. But nothing touched the original. The software library was so vast that its popularity lasted well beyond the ’80s, with a European resurgence in the early ’90s (where it was more popular than the NES), and in Eastern Europe until the late ’90s. Predictably, the hobbyist scene for both the Spectrum and the C64 is very strong, and people are still making games today, pushing the hardware to its absolute limits.