Interactive · 1982
The 1982 Showroom
It is December 1982, and you are standing in a British high-street computer shop with money that is genuinely yours — Christmas money, a birthday cheque, a paper round you have been doing since the summer.
The shelf in front of you is not the beginning of the home-computer age. It is the middle of it. The ZX80 came out in 1980, the ZX81 in 1981, and the BBC had picked its machine for the nation's schools in 1982. What has just changed is the price: a real computer is now within reach of an ordinary family, and everyone in the shop knows it.
There is no obvious right answer, and that is the point. Every machine on this shelf will be gone from the market within a decade or so, and what happens to the company that made it is not something anyone in the shop is thinking about. Pick one, and then find out what you actually bought.
How much have you got?
The shelf, December 1982
Pick a machine to inspect it. Anything over your budget is still on the shelf — that is the whole point of the exercise.
What happened to each machine
The same three stages the interactive walks you through, written out.
- ZX81 Sinclair Research · £69.95
It is the cheapest real computer anyone has ever sold, and it feels like it: 1K of memory, a keyboard you can barely type on, and a display that blanks every time you press a key. It also sells in enormous numbers, which is the point.
Sinclair sold the computer business and the Sinclair brand to Amstrad in April 1986 for £5m. The ZX81 was already history by then.
defunctCollectors' item. A ZX81 assembled by Timex in Dundee sits in the Centre for Computing History's catalogue as a numbered object. Many more went in the bin.
- ZX Spectrum Sinclair Research · £175 as 48K
The one everybody actually wants. Sinclair expected to sell a thousand a month and sold roughly two hundred thousand a month instead, which is why the shop keeps running out. Rick Dickinson's thin black case and rubber keys become the look of British computing.
Sinclair sold the brand to Amstrad in 1986; Amstrad carried the line on through the +2 and +3. The last model's production ended around 1990, though the range was reported as officially discontinued later — the sources disagree, and so does this card.
transformedThe name is still licensed for new retro hardware, new commercial games are still released for the original 48K machine, and emulation means the software never stopped running.
- BBC Micro Model B Acorn Computers · £335 (Model A from £235)
The responsible choice. It is the machine the BBC chose for its computer-literacy project, so it is what your school has, what the good software is written for, and what you can actually learn to program on properly. It is also four times the price of the Spectrum.
Acorn never turned the schools win into a mass-market business. It was rescued, restructured, and wound down by the end of the 1990s.
defunctThe machine is a museum piece. The company's real legacy went somewhere else entirely: Acorn's chip team designed ARM, which was spun out in 1990 and now designs the processor in most of the world's phones. A separate registry entry covers Acorn.
- Commodore 64 Commodore International · £399 (US $595)
The best-specified machine on the shelf by a distance. It has a sound chip nothing else can touch and graphics the Spectrum can only envy, and it will go on to be called the best-selling single computer model ever made.
Commodore International was liquidated in 1994. The brand name was sold on and has been passed around ever since.
defunctThe company is gone; the name has been resold for three decades. The registry entry on Commodore International follows the brand through every owner since.
- Dragon 32 Dragon Data · £199
The underdog, and it looks like good value: a proper keyboard, 32K, and a machine assembled in South Wales by a firm whose parent company made die-cast toys. It gets a loyal following and a decent software catalogue.
Dragon Data collapsed in 1984, less than two years after the machine launched. The Spanish rights outlived the company by a little longer.
defunctExtinct as a product and a company. It exists now mainly as a trivia answer about British computing outside the Cambridge–London axis, and as a collectors' machine.
- Oric-1 Oric Products International · £169
On paper this is the Spectrum-killer: more memory for less money, a real keyboard, and it is in the shop at the same time. In practice the software never arrives in enough quantity to matter, and the machine sells far below expectations.
Oric Products International went into receivership in 1984. The brand was briefly revived, then went quiet.
defunctAlmost forgotten in Britain, and unexpectedly alive in France, where a retro community kept the machine and its software going long after the company died. A small, strange afterlife.
- Atari 800 Atari, Inc. · about £699
This is the machine that feels like the future: arcade-quality games, a proper case, and a price that makes your parents go quiet. Buying it is a statement about what you think computers are for.
Atari was sold to Warner, then to Jack Tramiel, then its properties were passed from JTS to Hasbro to Infogrames. The original company is long gone.
transformedAtari still exists — as Atari SA, a French company, after a bankruptcy, a merger and a spell in crypto. One of the great zombie-brand stories, and it is in the registry.
- Apple II Apple Computer · about £990
Nobody in this shop is buying the Apple II by accident. It costs more than everything else here combined, and it is aimed at a school or a small business rather than a bedroom. What you get for the money is build quality and an ecosystem that will last.
The Apple II line was discontinued in 1993, after sixteen years — an extraordinarily long run for a home computer.
activeThe machine is a museum piece. The company that made it is the most valuable in the world, which is the least interesting and funniest possible answer to "where is it now".
Questions people actually ask
- What did a home computer cost in 1982?
- In Britain in 1982 a home computer cost anywhere from £69.95 for a Sinclair ZX81 to roughly £990 for an Apple II. The ZX Spectrum launched in April 1982 at £125 for a 16K machine and £175 for 48K, and the BBC Micro started at £235 for the Model A with the Model B at £335. The spread is enormous because these machines were not competing in the same market: the cheap end was a toy you typed on, and the expensive end was office equipment that happened to live at home.
- Which 1982 computer should I have bought?
- It depends what you wanted. The ZX Spectrum had the cheapest route to a large software library and became the machine most British programmers learned on. The Commodore 64 was technically the best home machine but cost more than twice as much. The BBC Micro was the sensible choice if you wanted to learn properly or your school had one. The honest answer is that almost nobody chose on the merits — they chose on price, and then found out what that price had bought them, which is what this showroom is about.
- Why is the ZX Spectrum so much more famous than the other machines here?
- Because of what it cost. The Spectrum was not the best computer of 1982 by any measure, but it was the one that got under a price that ordinary families would pay, and that made it the machine that ended up in the most bedrooms. A generation of British game developers started on one. The industry that grew out of those bedrooms is worth rather more than Sinclair ever was.
Where the prices come from
UK list prices for the model named. The ZX Spectrum figures (£125 for 16K, £175 for 48K) and the BBC Micro's entry price are as reported in the BBC's coverage of the machine's 25th anniversary; the remaining figures are the commonly cited launch prices and are being checked against the 1982–83 home-computer press. Where a machine came in several models, the one named is the one priced.
No logos, box art or ROMs appear on this page. Machine names are used descriptively and every card links to a sourced registry entry where one exists. Nothing you choose here is stored, sent anywhere or used to build a profile of you — your budget and your pick exist only in this browser tab.