On 23 December 2016 at 16:00, allison <[email protected]> wrote: > When the timex/sinclair with membrane keys got her eit was around 99$ > and immensely unpopular the later chicklet keyboard version was better > accepted. > BY then people wanted printer and mass storage and that machine was 2-4 > years > behind the expectations curve.
I think that is the best example of what I'm talking about in your comment. I've checked... The Apple ][ was $1298 in 1977. The Apple ][E was £1390 in 1983. The price didn't drop much, but the spec improved instead. That was, from the prices in Mike's computer fair report, ITRO £650-£700. The Sinclair ZX-80, ZX-81 and ZX Spectrum were all ITRO £100 or so when new, all within the time period between those 2 US models. And yet, in the occasional US computer magazine I'd see, the Apple machines were praised as low-cost personal computers compared to business machines, IIRC and AIUI. OK, so my £100/$1000 comparison was a bit off, but rather than a delta of 10× we are looking at one of 6-7×. So I wasn't far off! These were machines for non-techies to play with, notably, soon, for kids to play games on. The pre-Apple-II machines, the era of DIY things with discrete boards, no graphics, no sound, were both of little interest to non-specialists (or those who didn't want to be specialists) or kids, AFAICT. I could be wrong. They weren't of much interest to _me_ at 10YO or so, I can attest that. -- Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [email protected] • Google Mail/Talk/Plus: [email protected] Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR/WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +420 702 829 053
