Other Computers

Commodores

The Commodore PET came out in 1978 or so, and for awhile was one of the "Big Three" (with Apple and the TRS-80 being the other two).

The Commodore VIC-20 came out in 1981, and was much cheaper than just about any other "home" computer. (It also had a screen that was only 22-characters wide, and only 5K of memory. But it did have color, sound, and user-definable characters, although a lot of "POKE" commands were required to use these features. The VIC was still kind of fun to play around with, though.

The really popular Commodore was the 64, though. It had an 40-column screen, could display up to 16 colors at once, had excellent sound (up there with the Moog synthesizers, some would say). Again, though, it took loads of POKE commands to make the machine really sing and dance. There were a handful of third-party extended BASIC cartridges (Simon's Basic was the one I remember, there were others as well) that added commands to the BASIC to manipulate the graphics, sprites and sound. (Of course, these cartridges were incompatible with each other...)

Later on the Commodore 128 came out, with additional features such as an 80-column screen, and CP/M capability. (It also had a better BASIC, with commands that could handle the advanced sound and graphic features).

Atari

I also saw Atari 400's and 800's in various department stores, stereo stores and such. They were both about the same on the inside, but the 800 had a real keyboard (not the flat plastic one the 400 had) and was (officially) expandable to 48K of RAM

It had the nicest graphics of any of the personal computers up until the Amiga (not surprising, since they were both designed by the same person). The sound wasn't too bad either (4 voices of either pure musical tones, or various types of "noise" for special effects).

It also had sprite graphics (called "player/missile" in Atari-ese), but one had to do a lot of PEEKing and POKEing in order to use them from standard Atari BASIC. (There was also a Microsoft BASIC available for the Atari, but I've never used it).

Of course in many people's minds, "Atari" is synonymous with "video games", and there were no shortage of those on the Atari computers.

TRS-80 Pocket computer

Essentially an overgrown calculator that could run BASIC programs, these were popular with the engineering students of the 1980's. I had a chance to open one up once, to fix the "beeper" (it even had a beep command!)

TRS-80 Model 100 (and NEC 8201A)

This computer had an eight line by 64-column LCD screen, rudimentary sound, a built in 300-baud modem (on the NEC), and built in text editor, address book, and BASIC.

Sinclair, Timex, etc.

Monochromatic computers with tiny, membrane keyboards and a wierd entry method for BASIC statement entry. I tended to avoid them. OK, the Sinclair Spectrum had color and limited sound, so it seemed promising...

BBC Model B

I picked up this machine at a flea market. It had been modified to use American current, but that was about the only concession to U.S. users of this British microcomputer.

It produced a monochromatic (at least to NTSC TV's) picture up on UHF channel 38. There were a number of graphic modes, including the mysterious "Teletext" mode (designed to be compatible with European data-over-video systems). The Beeb also had powerful sound/music capabilities, similar to those of the TI 99/4a. Speakers were in the console itself, rather than the sound being sent to the TV.

Finding documentation and software proved to be quite a paper chase. Few Americans knew much about this machine, although it did get a nice write-up in Compute Magazine. I remember writing to a BBC/Acorn club in Australia, and getting a newsletter back with mostly Acorn Archimedes stuff in it.

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