The BBC micros were one side of the coin, perhaps the more respectable and middle-class side.
Round my way, it was Sinclair all the way, because they were cheap. The ZX81 is perhaps the archetype - they sold 1.5 million units, mainly to people who had no idea what they would do with a computer. At £69.95, it was cheap enough to be an impulse buy for most people, cheap enough that kids saved up their paper-round money.
A lot of early buyers ended up building their ZX81s from a kit (because it was £20 cheaper) and learned a lot. Even for those that bought it pre-assembled, there wasn't much to do but learn. The unexpanded ZX81 came with just 1kb of RAM and no bundled software, but it did come with a spiral-bound "Teach Yourself BASIC" book. The keyboard was covered in markings for BASIC shortcuts.
At the time, several magazines consisted of little more than printed source code, mainly for games, that you could type in yourself. These programs were invariably rubbish, but a mag was at least a quid cheaper than the cheapest of games on cassette so they sold shedloads. You'd spend an hour typing it all in and fixing all your typos, only to realise that it was a hopelessly boring game. Fiddling about with the source code was the most interesting thing to do.
The more enterprising kids realised that they could do better and earned a bit of pocket money selling programs to the magazines. The really enterprising kids knuckled down and wrote a retail-quality game, which in the mid-eighties you could do during the summer holidays. The origins of a large proportion of the British video games industry can be traced directly to a teenager, a Speccy, a blank tape and a particularly gloomy August.
We could argue endlessly over that, so I won't. The point stands that relative to other micros, Sinclairs were really cheap. The BBC model B launched at £335 but was sold at £399. The 'cheap' Acorn Electron launched in 1983 at £199, by which time you could get a ZX81 for under £40 or a 16k spectrum for £99.
Oh those magazine type-in games were utter turds - many did I type in that didn't work properly (partially due to my abysmal typing accuracy at the time).
Round my way, it was Sinclair all the way, because they were cheap. The ZX81 is perhaps the archetype - they sold 1.5 million units, mainly to people who had no idea what they would do with a computer. At £69.95, it was cheap enough to be an impulse buy for most people, cheap enough that kids saved up their paper-round money.
A lot of early buyers ended up building their ZX81s from a kit (because it was £20 cheaper) and learned a lot. Even for those that bought it pre-assembled, there wasn't much to do but learn. The unexpanded ZX81 came with just 1kb of RAM and no bundled software, but it did come with a spiral-bound "Teach Yourself BASIC" book. The keyboard was covered in markings for BASIC shortcuts.
At the time, several magazines consisted of little more than printed source code, mainly for games, that you could type in yourself. These programs were invariably rubbish, but a mag was at least a quid cheaper than the cheapest of games on cassette so they sold shedloads. You'd spend an hour typing it all in and fixing all your typos, only to realise that it was a hopelessly boring game. Fiddling about with the source code was the most interesting thing to do.
The more enterprising kids realised that they could do better and earned a bit of pocket money selling programs to the magazines. The really enterprising kids knuckled down and wrote a retail-quality game, which in the mid-eighties you could do during the summer holidays. The origins of a large proportion of the British video games industry can be traced directly to a teenager, a Speccy, a blank tape and a particularly gloomy August.