Share this article:
 Digg.com Facebook Google Bookmarks N4G Gamerblips del.icio.us Reddit Slashdot.org StumbleUpon There was no contest, the spectrum destroyed the competition.... :wink:
The BBC was a damn tough machine though. what the ****?...far as i was concerned it was Spectrum Vs Amstrad Vs Commodore64...BBC didnt even come into it,BBC was the shite Computers you used at school actually i may be thinking of the Speccy +2..when the 48k was out,i only had an Atari and a Commodore Vic 20...i wasn't aware of any battle with the BBC computer(i didn't even realise it was to be a home computer,i thought it was just for businesses) Yeah the BBC was definitely a part of the 80's home computer battle although it was always a distant 4th in the race to be top-dog.
As you say, it was thought of as a "serious" educational computer rather than a games machine and had a price to match, but had many enjoyable hours playing Elite, Revs, Frak etc...the memories! :) Nyuaaaaa... I hated my Vic 20. Loved my Speccy 48k though. Those rubber keys.... mmmm MMMM!
/me goes teary eyed who remembers acorn??? This sounds cool to watch. I have both these machines (actually the Acorn Electron, the cheaper version of the micro) and couple more around that time from my childhood and played them tons back then. Showing them to my nieces and nephew, they find it weird the machines, devices, trying to set the damn things up, load times etc. Ah the memories. Wow, Acorn... haven't used one of those since primary school!
We used to play Granny's Garden on the BBC at primary school as well.
Well, now I feel really, really old! I loved my speccy!
Every saturday in town we'd pop into WHSmiths (when they used to sell computers back in the day and let you load a game to try) and do the old fake loading trick.
print 'loading: latest game' and randomize usr 1234. Then watch as people hung around the machine thinking it was loading a game :D Right on the money! The C64 was the winner for me, though. Especially as it's still around with today's technology. An emulator has been developed for the iphone and, although at the moment rejected by Apple, has high hopes of being added to the app store after a couple of changes. Classics like IK+, Paradroid, the Monty games and tons more will never go away. You only need to look at the amount of fan-made remakes for proof of that. And I don't need to say anything about the music. the spectrum 48K and the C64 were definately better for games as a whole, but the BBC did have some genre defining games, Elite, Revs, Exile etc. The BBC micros real strength came from its peripherals and hardware, ability to use a co-processor, its Tube bus sytem, its excellent version of Basic, and the the 6502 assembler that came as part of it's OS.
It didn't have enough memory, and it was too pricey.
As for who remembers Acorn, well they produced one of the first RISC processors, and kind of evolved into ARM, the company that produces the processors for pretty much all your mobiles, including your snazzy iPhones, which you are getting excited about running your C64 emulators on.
The speccy and C64 won the gaming war, but the legacy of the BBC micro & acorn are still with us May I be the first to congratulate CVG for their usual standards of journalistic accuracy in describing both the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum as "consoles".
Well done fellas. you're almost catching up with my dear old mother when it comes to actually knowing things about home computing.
ps.
BBC Micro rules! Superior versions of Chuckie Egg and Elite among many, many other games, much better hardware expansions and connectivity (games through Teletext!) and a much better built machine all round!
The Speccy, on the other hand, was a horrible cheaply made machine with colour-clash and barely any support for it's disc-drive.
Yeah, I'm bringing it all up again, it's on baby, it's on! I think I am going to have to tune into this. I still have a speccy. Fully working order with a load of original games... (No pun intended there)
I like the name, syntax era :lol: the speccy was king in my eyes but the C64 was pretty awesome to be honest. sh!t you could even listen to tunes whilst the rest of the game loaded.
ahem, anyway the BBC was super expensive at the time and that's probably why it didn't sell so much.
funny how history repeats itself huh?
still got my 48k rubber keyed badbou with compurter and videogame stickers on. i'm gonna send in a photo one of these days. they must be over 25 years old now :) We had them at my comprehensive. We also had one in my middle school along with the code books to write your own programs.
In my comprehensive though we had that Lander game on some of the machines. That was pretty sweet for a while. Other memories from my IT class include getting my fags confiscated and blowing up johnnies and sticking them to the underside of the desks so the next person to sit there got a surprise.
Sigh... sadly that level of immaturity has vanished. But then maybe if I hadn't blown up those johnnies I wouldn't be a daddy right now. :? (Not that I regret having the sprog... although she is throwing a wobbly right now!) Ah, Granny's Garden. Sweet memories! All they need to do now is crowbar a charlie brooker appearance in somehow (the man`s a gamer beleive it or not ,used to write for pczone)maybe as the narrator? Spectrum vs BBC? Huh? When did that happen?
The two machines were wildly different in price and capacity and only shared a timeframe for a
couple of years. The BBC never had the mass appeal of the Speccy, C64 or even the CPC464.
Pft. I still have a load of issues of PCZone from when Charlie Brooker was a reviewer for it.
I remember it's sister mag Games Zone used to have Jane Goldman as a staff writer also. (Jonathan Ross's wife. Wrote the screenplay to Stardust) :) | 
