BATTLE OF THE 8-BITS

TO SET THE SCENE for the rise of ’80s micro-computers, we need to start with 1977’s Apple II. It was available for the “cheap” price of $1,298 (around $5,370 in today’s money), which bought you a 6502 CPU, 4K of RAM, and six colors—or 16 at very low resolution.

This was a great deal at the time, and was enough to seriously bloody IBM’s nose. Although the hardware wouldn’t change much in this period, costs had to come down drastically for home computing to really take off. Which they did—but the US and British approaches to this economic problem were vastly different.

The ZX Spectrum resulted from the