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Which 70's and 80's era home computer was best?

Congratulations Commodore Amiga, you're 25 years old and many of us still remember you.

A quarter of a century is an awfully long time in the "here today, gone tomorrow" world of computers and their fickle users and I suspect there are very few Amigas around these days. However, those that are still in working condition with readable software might well be worth a penny or too.

The Amiga was a significant step in the evolution of home computer, offering sound and graphics capabilities that were, for the era, mind-bogglingly powerful.

Indeed, the Amiga was a huge leap forward from Commodore's original home computer, the PET -- but what other iconic "home computer" (ie: pre-PC) brands and models deserve equal places in the hallowed halls of micro-computer history?

There is of course the ZX80 which was many people's first "real computer". Despite its feeble memory and quirky (and qwerty) touch-(in)sensitive keypad, the ZX80, and to a much greater extent it's successor the ZX81 were the start of the real non-hacker home computer market in the UK and its territories.

While rich Americans could afford such "wow" machines as the Apple II, Tandy TRS80, and Atari 800, the price of these machines was pretty much beyond the reach of eager young programmers in this part of the world.

In fact, I recall paying about $1,400 in 1983(?) dollars for an Atari 400 and a few game cartridges, way back then. By comparison, the ZX80/81 was just a couple of hundred dollars.

My first TRS80 (a model 1 with 16Kbyte memory expansion, lower-case kit and floppy disk drive) set me back nearly $2,000. Of course I quickly upgraded it and eventually it had 48K of RAM, four double-density double-sided 5.25-inch floppy disks and the wonderful NewDos-80 operating system. Ah, happy days!

I recall writing many business applications for the Tandy TRS80 systems including the Model 1, Model 2 (With twin 8-inch drives) and Model 3. The Model 1/3 stuff was usually written in BASIC with carefully optimised assembler for things such as sorting (because the BASIC garbage collection routines would really kill a string-based sort in BASIC). The Model 2 stuff was written in Pascal MT+ under CP/M.

Then of course there was the truly wonderful Compucolor 128 which cost about $4,500 (from memory).

That beauty had 128x128 8-colour graphics, an inbuilt 128Kbyte floppy drive and the most monstrous (and heavy) keyboard you've ever seen. With its 8085 processor it wasn't a speed machine but for the day, it offered truly impressive graphics.

Of course Commodore's VIC 20 had already become the nation's most popular "home computer" with its crude (but effective) graphics and sound. The VIC 20 and the Commodore 64 that followed were great game machines simply because they offered a good amount of hardware-assisted graphics.

Unlike previous machines which required animation to be programmed by manipulating all the pixels involved, the VIC 20 and C64 used hardware-based sprites (as did the far more expensive Ataris) that allowed simple images to be repositioned and moved about the screen simply by updating their coordinates in the registers provided. This meant you could even write half-playable games in BASIC. Indeed, I recall huge numbers of magazines and books being available which contained little more than page after page of BASIC program listings -- much of it just a succession of DATA statements followed by masses of numbers.

These were great days for computers, if you could afford them. Almost every month a new brand and model of computer would be released onto the market, promising faster speeds, better graphics and other wonderful features.

The only level of compatibility was the BASIC language, but that didn't seem to matter because we wrote many of our own applications and games.

It was the transition from an era when to get yourself a "home computer" meant you had to actually build something -- to an era when you could buy a turnkey system off the shelf and learn to program without having to know a shift-register from a hex inverter.

This was also a pre-internet era, so the few of us who were computer owners often found it necessary to re-invent the wheel whenever we wanted to create a new application. DrDobbs, Byte and other monthly periodicals were our bibles and we savoured every page, every article and every advertisement.

When we gathered in small groups, we computer-geeks would spend endless hours debating the merits of the 8080 versus 6502 versus Z80 processors and ways to avoid the intensely annoying "Checksum error" which plagued everyone that used an audio cassette player to store and load their software from.

Well those are some of my early memories of the humble "home computer" more than 25 years ago.

Do you have any to share? Or did you buy your first computer much later in the game - when everything had already gone beige and Microsoft?

Which of all the computers you've owned is the one you loved the most, and why?

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