On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 19:17, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
> Very interesting to see this perspective from the UK! Oh good. :-) > Located in the U.S. (Washington, D.C), I started with an Apple II+ in 1979 as a 12 year old. This confirms the sort of thing I read. US users had specifications of kit we couldn't _dream_ of... big (for the time) high-end machines like the Apple II and Atari 8-bits, with full-size full-travel keyboards, internal expansion slots, monitors, floppy disk drives -- even multiple ones! It took me years, as a teenaged university student, to save up enough to add a disk interface and a single 5.25" DS/DD 80-track drive to my Spectrum. That cost me about £150, and it gave me a Centronics printer port, so I could add a Panasonic KX-P 1080 9-pin dot matrix printer -- another £75 or so. I still used a portable TV, though. Monitors remained out of reach and the Spectrum didn't even have a monitor port anyway. Before that I struggled along with ZX Microdrives. I just bought a used one, to try to 3D print replicas of the case, one for an SD card drive, one for a Raspberry Pi... They were crappy things -- 100 kB of not-very-reliable storage on an endless tape loop in a tiny (postage-stamp sized) miniaturised 8-track cassette -- but one drives and the interface were £80. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Microdrive Stuff like expansion slots, disk controllers as a standard offering, monitor and printer ports -- they were luxuries for rich people with high-end micros. > Out of curiosity, I later bought the Sinclair ZX-80, but coming from the Apple, I thought the > ZX-80 was horrid and not useable. Compared to an Apple II, it probably was, to be fair. > I later also tried the Timex Sinclair 1000.. better.. but still seemed like a waste of time toy. Slightly uprated version of the same machine, basically. I guess the thing to try to imagine is that the ZX81 -- the basis of the TS1000 -- was around a tenth of the price of the Apple II, and entirely usable with a cassette recorder and a portable B&W TV. In a country where people had say a quarter of the buying power of the USA, *that* was an affordable machine. The Apple II wasn't. The differential hasn't entirely gone, but nobody notices it or mentions it now. Most don't know. US petrol gasoline today: $2.80 per gallon. (£2 per 3.78 litres, or £0.52 per litre) https://gasprices.aaa.com/ UK petrol today: £1.23 per litre. http://www.petrolprices.com/ We pay 2.5 x more than you for petrol. Much the same applies to many ordinary groceries -- bread, beer, clothing, etc. "Median household income in the U.S. rose to an estimated $59,055 in January 2018" https://seekingalpha.com/article/4152222-january-2018-median-household-income "The Office for National Statistics Salary statistics show and average earning of £26,500" https://www.icalculator.info/news/UK_average_earnings_2014.html US: £42,415 versus UK £26,500 That's why Sinclair did so well. > Mind you, I had a monitor, and (2) disk drives on the Apple and had had exposure to > HP, DEC, and IBM minicomputers by the age of 16. > Always with my nose into my own business, I'd no idea how fortunate I was until reading > of others' experiences here. For comparison, I now live in Czechia. Still in the EU and not one of the poorest. The average cost of living here in the capital is about 1/3 of what it is in London. In the 2nd city, Brno, where I used to live, it was about 1/4 of London. "Wages in Czech Republic increased to 31646 CZK/Month in the fourth quarter of 2017" https://tradingeconomics.com/czech-republic/wages That's a little over £1,000 per month, £13,000 a year. Or $1,500 per month, $18,000 a year. The USA has it a *lot* better off than most Americans realise. As my former flatmate put it, when I put an iPad in his hands: "this is the first time I have ever touched an Apple product. Nobody I know has an Apple computer, or ever had." Here in Prague, iPhones are common and I see MacBooks everywhere -- but of course the city is full of tourists. By local standard, Apple kit today is nearly as unaffordably remote as an Apple II was to me in 1982 when I got my ZX Spectrum, second hand for £80. -- Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [email protected] • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: [email protected] Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
