Top 5 Retro Computers: Terms and conditions apply

In France, which had a pretty poor home computer market, the CPC was all the rage. Almost all the kids I knew had one.

Hail AI!!!

CPC vet here. Shockingly, had considered the Oric-1 a couple of years eariier. Any Atari ST vets seething at the cut-off? [Oh, do I get bonus points for using the SGI IRIS Indigo a decade on?]

yeah, it is largely forgotten that in the 1980's the 2 biggest computer retailers in the UK was WH Smiths (newsagent and stationers) and Boots (a Chemist). And I don't remember them selling more than the Sinclair/Commodore/Acorn and later Amstrad machines. Software they did have for those other systems were mostly due to the explosion of budget software.
I did know someone who had an Atari in 81/82 ish, but they never got widespread support until after Jack Tramiel bought Atari and stock cleared the hardware (bought mine from Dixons).
I saw Einsteins in the wild, only ONE apple 1

could you please stop torturing us with the background music?

When you say "operating system", it seems you mean the user interface; I always thought the C64 has a great UI, with the commands of a full blown programming language (not just OS commands) in direct mode, resulting in a command screen (commands can be anywhere, can be repeated with or without modification, put into a loop, etc. ) and not just a command line as in MS DOS or Linux.

hahaha . a wild dave appears :D

There was a short lived upto 3k expansion ( in white plastic) for the ZX80 which gave you upto 4k in total. This was even more fragile than the ZX80's case and was replaced by a more robust black 16k unit which was eventually rebadged as the Zx81 expansion...

Amazing to see the beautiful beeb at no.1! I love the bbc micro :)

for my top 5, i would go: 5. commodore amiga 2000, 4. Techtronix 3. Acorn System 3/5 2. BBC micro 1. Acorn archimedes (bug box)

You know you have a tough audience, when you need 10 minutes explaining your top 5 selection

"Amstrad CPC464, the only machine sold by the foot". Chapeau, sir.

I had an SFD 1001 floppy drive with my C64 (with a switchable ROM to be able to use it). Man, I never felt like having so much space again in my life.

Oh we poked Dave, Neil and Ollie about this :)

My introduction to the quaint world of British home computing was a paperback by Dick Francis: “Twice Shy” which probably precedes your top five.

Erm, the ZX80 and ZX80 didn’t have video circuitry (or at least beyond vestigial). The Z80 was responsible for displaying anything, which is why the screen flickered or blanked when you did anything (it stopped working on displaying things). The ZX81 at least generated sync pulses without CPU help, but it wasn’t until the Spectrum that Sinclair actually put hardware in place to generate a proper video signal.

Imagine a world where the Internet never caught on outside business and research, you'd be using Prestel and whatever services the BPO saw fit to provide, thinking this was the coolest thing ever.

Wonderful video, but could you please upload a version without that godawful music in the not so background?

Loved it! As always, an enjoyable trip. Dunno if you noticed but number 2 on the countdown is actually titled "4" heh

Why the Spectrum was a bad computer? I had a Spectrum (well, an Eastern European clone) and it was fantastic.
That was until a friend came to visit for a week, and I bragged abot my computer. He said that he would came with his computer too. Of course, he brought an C64. Alter playing many hours, I got into Basic and tried some programs. I was instantly amazed about how good it was to type a command and execute it, instead using command keys like in Spectrum. Then I started to look at my Spectrum as a toy. That was until I got some tapes with programming languages. I had Lisp, Pascal and I think Forth. The most I used for programming was Pascal (I got the manual, that is why) that also had some compiler (or an autorun form tape, without the need to load them and then type run). Later, in late 80s-early 90s, I meet some students that had an modified Spectrum clone that ran CP/M, added a floppy interface, made a printer expansion and could run regular CP/M software. And ofcourse, with a switch, it reversed to be a Spectrum.
Spectrum was quite an underrated computer but, as you said, in its original form was a cheap computer and one got what he paid for.

Totally agree with your choice of the BBC as the number 1. I still use my own today when I feel nostalgic. Could have used a few more colours in some graphics modes but that was the 80s. 😊

Very comprehensive video, and difficult to argue with.

The C64 could indeed be augmented to run various business applications and a GUI.

Looking up "Commodore 128D GEOS Battle Station" will give you one, related example. The new C64OS also demonstrates what an augmented C64 is capable of.

You are probably right about the best 8-bit version of Elite. You seem to have hands-on experience. Although I always thought the C64 version was pretty good for a 1 Mhz low-res system.

The Archimedes is outside the context of this video, but Elite on this system has the reputation of being the best ever.

Seems like a fair list - though fairly staggered the C64 rated so highly - don't get me wrong, I love the C64. I had one when I was 11 (and I currently own four). But I remember giving my middle school maths teacher pretty much exactly the same speech you just did about how bloody awful the BASIC implementation was, the completely lack of hardware support in it and how much it palled in comparison to the Beeb. The beeb, which, if I remember correctly was used at school to digitise video capture from a camera and was being used to run a light-pen to record borrowing from the library and another was being used to download data from weather satellites.

TSR80 or TRS80?

I brought my Atari 400 in 1982 when I went to University - it was technically the best 8 bit machine. Too expensive for the UK market. I still have that 400 to this day

I think it's more accurate to say the time period considered is 1980-1984. If including 1985, then the Commodore 128 and Atari ST would surely be in the top 5. [Amiga was too expensive and NTSC only in 85, and MSX machines too rare in UK]

Best listicle ever. Even though for a second there I thought you were going to argue the Silicon Graphics Indigo was a UK micro. ;) 

As a person who grew up in the US in the late 1980s-early 2000s, I completely missed out on basically all of these. We had very old Apple IIs in the typing lab when I was in the first grade, and I learned to type and play Oregon Trail on it, but that's about it.

They all sound amazing (except the OG Spectrum and its malevolent keyboard), but I'd definitely love to experience a BBC Micro at some point. The only thing I notice looking at it is how far off the desk the keyboard is. Did y'all always have thick wrist rests or something? That looks *painful*.

Aesthetically, the Amstrad CPC looks the best, both in terms of colors and also the way the tape deck is integrated. From what I've learned, winning on looks is a very Alan Sugar flex.

Re. C64, the inaccuracy about its floppy drives has already been raised, but there's another re. its Basic. The reason it was lacking more sophisticated features wasn't because they didn't want to pay Microsoft (again). It was actually due to cost cutting - Basic v2.0 kept the ROM to 4k. [Some PETs, before the C64, had better versions. There were two Basic expansion cartridges released by Commodore. And, later machines like the C16/+4, C128 (and C65) all got improved versions without any additional payments to Microsoft.]

In some senses calling things like ZX80 and 81 and other similar things computers is questionable. I used to waltz around with various items in my pocket that people called calculators. Very few people called them computers, but to be fair - they kick the living and undead shit out of some of these "computers". But in general the UK focus means it doesn't really apply to anywhere else. I've had a Spectrum. The dead flesh keyboard one. I don't think I got a PSU for it but I can't remember for sure. I never did anything with it other than sort of make fun of it, I have no idea if it worked or not, it was just funny as a thing. But I didn't live in the UK, so whether it did or didn't work didn't matter.
My start of sniffing at computers that actually did something, however limited it was, was VIC-20 that did show a picture when all connected up to a TV. You could type on it, or well, force the keys down with luck and effort one by one. I did write a loop to print a short string of text to the screen, but that was as far as I got with it. Which is going further than anyone else did as far as I know. I did start trying to type a game into the thing from a magazine, but after a bit over an hour I went to take a break outside and someone helpfully turned it off.
I also got an Amstrad PPC640 without any floppies at one point, it had a basic interpreter built in, which I also wrote a text printing loop into that was a bit more complex than the one on the VIC. I wrote it down on paper to remember it, since I had no way to save anything on it. Then I got a Toshiba MSX which I did actually get as far as playing a game on! Whee! I have no idea what happened to it anymore.
I did get exposed to an Amiga 500 a bit, and play games on it, and I did get to click around on a Macintosh SE I think, my mom had one for a bit.
The Amiga and the Mac were what I would agree to call Computer. Barely, but they just squeak into that classification. Everything else I've mentioned is just proto-computer sheisse, mostly because you can actually DO stuff with them, like write and save a text to a floppy, and open it back up and read it. I know you theoretically can on the previously mentioned proto computer dogpoops but I don't care. Zero Fuggs Given. Do not despair, I never got to do much on either, and thus do not care about them at all.
Now we finally get to stuff I actually got to use! Woohoo! This includes AGA generation Amigas, as well as a 486 quickly followed by a Pentium 60mhz. I was reasonably happy with the Amiga, even got an A4000/040 that I had a while, then I had various forms of workstations, from SPARC to SGI to Motorola MicroStack and IBM RS/6000.
I ended up having a wide variety of computers, from a SPARC laptop to several different SGI machines including an ONYX RE2 and many RS/6000 systems and a HP-UX box of some denomination that was too much work to get going to bother. Oh, also a SS1000E with 8 processors and 1gig memory, which was a huge deal at the time. Also far too loud to keep running more than a couple of hours at a time. After this I bailed and just used PC's, although I think most people would raise an eyebrow at the configurations I have surrounding me even today, the machines within 1m of me typing right now include an 18core box, a 14 core box and a HP ML350G10 that unfortunately only has one CPU at the moment, but will eventually get upgraded to dual 28 core I think. Typing this on a boring quadcore laptop though, I don't use the other stuff to "surf the interwebz" on, they have no monitors connected right now, only power and network cables.
So, this is sort of a compressed retroish dive as well as what I think is a computer in the proper sense and what isn't. I had many more machines than the ones mentioned here, but they weren't important for this specific idea.

Okay, I think your were bit hard on the Co--Co TRS-80 (and it Dragon, Welsh counter part), the TRS-80 was more than just one model like Spectrum, but unlike Spectrum, under cover the basicly still all the same machine, so the all the software eco-system, the later model, did start doing things the first model could not, but they all feel the same more or less, and back to not stock out of the box, but the system that was setup, the have, with all the must have, to make it usable? The TRS-80 had a long list of in-house add-ons; most of the bit covers for the over-machines cover in your countdown of the top 5 retro computers. and TRS-80 had big brothers to real businesses (proper computers that more or less worked the same, and the up-grade system was aloud; the stock TRS-80 colour basic was (in-house) upgradeable to an extended basic that any machine that was doing software for machines would have). and one of a very small list of possible one or machines, the actly "MICROSOFT BASIC, EXTENDED..." As the boot-up taglane, before typing anything comes up on the screen? But as I say, I think if BBC you put in the number 1 slot, it can just use any CPU it wants to, and still, the total moden CPU, like the Pi Arm chip, is a hard function to beat? 🙂

The time's range is a bit random and specific... It's bang on for me! :-) Thanks!

After 35 years I can still remember my BBC login when I was as secondary school

*I am 10.254 p110167

I don’t think our 8 year old brains truly appreciated just what beasts BBC Model B, a real engineer’s machine, I/O for literally everything and then some.

I have to admit the CPC464 was a pretty decent machine too. My aunt had one for a time in the early 90s… loading games off tape was pretty old hat by then, but it was fun.

The BBC Micro was an outstanding system, but I never realized that back in the day. We were all poisoned against it by our experiences at school. Every school had a BBC, but very few had teachers who knew how to operate it. So we had assignments that were impossible to complete.

The BBC was quite a good thing for schools, but I did grow up with a massive amount of sympathy for kids that had a BBC, as when everyone else at school was talking about the latest games they did have a face like they had just suffered some extreme levels of cruelty (which perhaps their parents had done when they purchased the BBC for their kids!) with their only comeback being "But the BBC has Elite!" until every other machine also had it.
I dare say that if any of those tortured BBC Kids good have a tracking device now, they will hunt down their school C64 and Spectrum owning friends from the past to show that with a 21st century Raspberry PI, their BBC is now more powerful than the Commodore 64 and Spectrums back in the day!
All said and done though, when I was a kid, I did used to get sucked into a good game of kingdom on the BBCs they had at school.

Listicle sounds too much like something that means bollocks

VIC-20 all the way.

"let you computer become a PC", stop parroting that a PC had to run M$ to be a personal computer, IE: PC

What, no Nascom 2? Just kidding, your list is hard to argue against given the boundaries. Now make one for the following 5 years. That would be a lot more contentious I think.

dunno about you but the XZ81 is much much more of a British computer, regardless of its crappy keyboard and even the Dragon 32 is more British than the C64 will ever be, regardless of the latter being built in Britain. You may as well call the C64 German or from Hong Kong. It sure as hell wasn't, isn't and won't ever be a British computer.

What's a TSR-80? I know what a TRS-80 is, but not a TSR-80

1. Amiga
2. C65
3. CBM-II
4. C128
5. Honeywell kitchen computer

Lovely listicle! :)

Commodore 64 sold in millions, got 2nd place, BBC Micro was completely unknown in europe and sold "reasonable well" - and this got 1st place??? Only on your island, dude, only on that island... 🤣 I wuold say, the C64 was over the top! You could do gaming, but also serious stuff with controlling relais, using it as a weather-station and so much more!

British microcomputer scene seems to be the most interesting one, yea america had something special but, not as interesting. Not as varied. And. Well. Soviet ones are interesting as curiosities. Living in Finland, i sometimes see them on the market here too. Fascinating things. But mostly just clones of existing systems. Also. Japanese systems are interesting. Very varied and very different. But hard to find info on in languages i can understand.
So. British it is. The land of early computing that i find the most interesting. And. Yep thank you for making it the area this video is about.