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Look back in Ascii: Computing in the 1980s

Another article, part of Retro Week, from British tech site Reg Hardware, looks at the computers of the 1980s:

When I landed the job of Doctor Who Script Editor in 1981, I knew I needed a computer. Actually it was something I’d known since the age of 12, but back then you couldn’t get started for less than half a million dollars. Now you could pick up a Sinclair ZX81 for a shade under fifty quid in kit form. But if you wanted a serious computer for writing - and I did - you needed much deeper pockets. 

The IBM PC was launched in the UK that summer for a little over £2000, and shortly before Christmas the £235 BBC Micro arrived.

In fact, a number of usable machines had been coming onto the market since the late 1970s: for around £600 you could get the butt-ugly Commodore PET, and if you had around twice that to spare there was, of course, the Apple II — although lower case characters on the screen would cost you extra for a much coveted hardware plug-in called “Dan Paymer’s Lower Case Adapter”.

At one point I had my heart set on the Exidy Sorcerer. I liked its standardisation: it was built around the S100 bus and the Z80 processor and ran the CP/M operating system. Unfortunately it went out of production around this time.

Meanwhile, my desk was piling up with submissions from would-be Doctor Who writers. One of these was a computer buff. Andrew Stevenson’s stories never made it to the screen, but he steered me in the direction of a company up in Nottingham that was importing an affordable dual-floppy CP/M machine direct from America, the Vector Graphic System B. I got to try it by promising to review it for a popular computing magazine of the time, Practical Computing.

You can read the rest of the article here