If you were in the market for a home computer in Britain in 1983, there would typically be three models that most people would choose: the Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum or Acorn BBC Micro. There were other machines (such as the Dragon 32), and it did seem that this fast-growing market was ripe for more players.
One interested player was Tangerine Computer Systems, who had made the Microtan 65 some years earlier. Tangerine certainly had the technical skills to make a competitive machine, and seeing a gap in the market they set about creating the Oric-1 microcomputer, though a newly-formed subsidiary named Oric Products International.
Oric-1
The Oric-1 was very much aimed against the Spectrum end of the market, similarly priced and similar too in size. Based on a 6502 rather than a Z80, it was (like the Spectrum) available in 16Kb and 48Kb varieties – although a peculiarity of the hardware design meant that the latter actually had 64Kb of memory, the top 16Kb not be accessible without tinkering. The sound on the Oric was far better than on the Spectrum, using the popular AY-3-8910 chip. Four different graphics modes were available – more like the BBC than the Spectrum, and the inbuilt BASIC was pretty powerful as well. Last but not least, the chicklet keyboard had small, hard buttons which were much nicer to use than the Spectrum’s notorious “dead flesh” keyboard.
The main problem was bugs – the Oric-1’s ROM was full of them, and also the cassette interface was unreliable - which was a major problem for a home computer of the time. One other problem was that the promised peripherals – a printer interface, modem and floppy disk drive – ended up being later into production. Disappointments aside, it was a good system and sold at least a couple of hundred thousand units while it was on sale.
Oric-1 and Oric Atmos
Oric struggled for money, but a takeover from a company called Edenspring Investments led to more money being available, leading to the improved Oric Atmos being launched in 1984. However, the home computer market was heading for a crash and Oric ended up in receivership – twice – before finally going bust in 1987. However, licensed cloned versions continued including the Bulgarian Pravetz 8D. A sad end, but of course today none of Acorn, Commodore or Sinclair are with us either so perhaps not unexpected.
Today the Oric-1 is an uncommon but collectable device, with prices for good systems being a couple of hundred pounds or so, the later Atmos commands higher prices and rarer derivatives more still. Perhaps in the end it wasn’t a significant machine, but there was
In 1983 the Apple Computer Company was just seven years old, but had grown very rapidly on the back of strong sales of the Apple II. By the early 1980s though, the Apple II was looking increasingly out-of-date. In 1980 the Apple III was launched, designed to fix many of the shortcomings of its predecessor, but it was a deeply unreliable and poorly-built product and was a sales disaster.
The launch of the IBM PC in 1981 saw Apple struggling in the business market, so it was very important that whatever they came up with next would be a success. Sadly for Apple, their next product – the Apple Lisa – ended up as another disaster, even if it did seem to hold great promise.
Apple Lisa 1
The key feature of the Lisa was the mouse-drive graphical interface, the computer unit itself was an elegant single-box design with an integrated 12 inch monitor. It looked very different in both hardware and software terms from the competition, and both the mainstream media and specialist press were very excited.
Development of the Lisa had started years earlier, at first with modest aims but quickly becoming influenced by the work that fellow Silicon Valley engineers at Xerox were doing with their Alto platform which was being developed into the Xerox Star. When Steve Jobs saw the Alto’s graphical interface he was highly impressed, and the Apple team sought to emulate and improve on it. The concepts of the mouse-driven user environment were not new - Doug Engelbart had demonstrated the concepts as far back as 1968 – but it was only really in the 1980s that computer hardware started to become affordable enough to make it a reality.
The mouse was still a novelty when the Apple Lisa was launched, as this cover from Personal Computer World shows
Unlike previous Apple models which were based on the 6502, the Lisa was built around a Motorola 68000, clocked at 5MHz along with one megabyte of RAM. Neither the CPU nor RAM were very fast, even by 1983 standards. The display was a 720 x 364 pixel black-and-white unit with no greyscale capabilities. Twin 5.25-inch variable speed floppy drives (known by the name “Twiggy”) offered a lot of storage, but were very unreliable. The Lisa was also designed to be used with a 5MB external hard drive, and a variety of printers were available.
The look and feel of the operating system was far in advance of everything outside of Xerox’s labs. Based largely around the file manager, it became the template for the OS used on the later Macintosh. A crude form of protected memory was available, but overall the operating system ran sluggishly on the hardware. The Lisa had a variety of office applications available, including a word processor, spreadsheet, graphical applications and utilities.
This may all sound very familiar because the Macintosh, launched a year later, also did many of the things that the Lisa did. But the Lisa is not the Mac’s predecessor, instead this ended up as a dead end which cost Apple a lot of money. Not only was the hardware and software unstable, but the price of the Lisa started at an eye-watering $9,995 in 1983 money (around $30,000 today). Any appeal that the Lisa may have had was undermined by the launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, which did most of the things the Lisa could do, but more reliably and at a quarter of the price.
The Lisa flopped, selling only about 10,000 units. A redesigned Lisa 2 in 1984 was cheaper, more reliable but more underpowered than the original. There was some interest from customers who wanted a device with a bigger display than the standard Mac, but the Lisa needed an emulator to run Mac software. In 1985 the final iteration of the Lisa was launched, as the Macintosh XL which proved to be at least of interest to consumers, but Apple ended up selling it at a loss.
Killed off by its own internal competition, a combination of cheap or untested components and an enormous price tag, the Lisa is one of the biggest failures in the history of Apple. Conversely the cut-down and more focussed version, the Macintosh, was one of the biggest successes. Today, a working Lisa system is very collectible and commands prices of thousands of dollars, although you are more likely to find the later Lisa 2 than the original.
Apple is a company with more ups and downs than most. By 2002, Apple had already had success with the original Apple II in 1977, wobbled a bit with the Apple III in 1980 but then moved on to more success with the original Macintosh in 1984. Successes followed, but during the 1990s the company’s fortunes declined significantly and by 1997 it was a whisker away from bankruptcy. But in 1997 Steve Jobs returned to Apple and injected some new ideas, and aided by now legendary design Jony Ive the company came up with the iconic iMac G3 – launched in 1998 – which fundamentally changed Apple’s fortunes.
The iMac G3 is one of Apple’s best-loved designs. Beautifully designed around the shape of the cathode ray tube (CRT) contained inside in translucent candy-coloured cases, the G3 caused a monumental stir in the market. Here was a computer than both looked beautiful and just worked out of the box. Sure, the basic design idea had been around for more than 20 years (the ADM3A being a notable example)… but Apple did it better.
Apple iMac G4
By 2002 though technology had changed. Just four years previously the CRT was the standard display for almost all desktop computers, but by the early 2000s there was a shift towards LCD panels which were rapidly dropping in price and increasing in capabilities. Although CRTs still had a bit more life in them, the obvious choice for a forward-looking company such as Apple was to go with LCDs for their next-generation iMac.
In design terms though, the LCD panel necessitated a completely different design from the CRT in the G3. It wouldn’t make any sense to replicate the G3’s design when most of the box would be empty space with an LCD, but the G3 had set an incredibly high bar in design terms. So where could Apple go next?
So the Apple design team – led by Jony Ive – came up with something completely different. Instead of tucking all the system components in close to the display, the Apple iMac G4 featured the LCD mounted in an adjustable arm with the actual computer tucked into a large dome at the base. The base contained everything, including an optical drive, and it gave the G4 a distinctive look in the manner of an oversized desk lamp.
Inside was a PowerPC processor running at between 700 MHz and 1.2 GHz. Maximum memory was 1 or 2GB depending on model, but a rather more modest 128 or 256MB was supplied in the box. Internal expansion was limited as this was a compact all-in-one unit like its predecessor, but peripherals could be added via USB or FireWire. A modem and wired Ethernet port were built in, a wireless network adapter was available as an option.
It was an elegant – if odd-looking solution – with everything you needed in the box which required minimal effort to get working. However, the LCD panels were still pricey compared to CRTs so a few months later the eMac was launched, the last CRT-based Mac which was a fair bit cheaper than the iMac and sold well to educational markets.
Alternatively you could have bought a PC in a beige or grey box
The G4 stayed in production for just two and a half years before being replaced by the rather more sober G5. Today collectors can pick up a G4 for less than the price of the G3 with typical prices for a working system being just £120 or so.
The history of postwar European car design has several chapters. Immediately after the Second World War, motor manufacturers simply started with the designs they had in the 1930s and went from there. Although this had some successes such as the 2CV, the average motorist in the early 1950s had a choice of expensive and not terribly up-to-date vehicles to choose from.
By the late 1950s, smaller cars such as the Fiat 500 came to the market. Much cheaper than anything else about, they were still practical and useful and a great deal of what followed was inspired by the idea of cheap motoring. Renault in particular had found success with the 1961 Renault 4 which despite being rather basic and slow was popular for its interior space and its versatile cargo bay.
By the end of the decade technology and design had moved on. The bulk of demand was still for small cars, and it was becoming obvious that the idea of a hatchback offered maximum versatility, especially in a small car. Simca had strong sales for the compact 1100 during this period, but it was rather stuck in the 60s in terms of design. The market was ripe for a change.
Into this story came a designer named Michel Boué who worked for Renault. As a side project he had been working on a design for a compact and modern hatchback. Although it was never an official project, it eventually came to the attention of Renault’s management who were impressed and commissioned a prototype, with the car being green-lit for production as the Renault 5, with a formal launch in January 1972.
Renault 5
A front-engined, front-wheel drive car with bang-up-to-date styling, the 5 looked far more modern than rivals which were stuck in the sixties. The Renault 5 firmly looked forward to the 1970s. Styling features included rectangular headlights, large (and effective) plastic bumpers and a large hatch at the back with narrow lights on either side to maximise loading capacity.
The Renault 5 certainly had bags of style..
Over its lifetime the selection of engines ranged from a tiny 0.8 litre unit of a 1950s vintage to a rather spicy 1.4 litre turbo. Weighing only around 800kg, the Renault 5 didn’t need a whole lot of power to propel it. It loaned itself to hot hatches (such as the Alpine and Gordini variants) and even a mid-engined sports car with the epic Renault 5 Turbo. There were a few odd things about it, such as the wheelbase being different on either side of the car, but overall this was a very capable package.
Crucially, the 5 was ahead of most of the competition in terms of launch date. Even the contemporary Fiat 127 wasn’t available as a hatch at launch (it was a saloon), and rivals Volkswagen, GM Europe and Ford were years behind. Even the original hot hatch versions pipped the classic Golf GTI to the post by two months.
Renault 5 Turbo and US-Spec Le Car
Unusually for a small French car it was also sold in the United States by Renault’s partner AMC under the questionable name of the Renault Le Car. The 5 was sold widely around the world, and it was manufactured in diverse countries such as Venezuela, South Africa and Iran in addition to its home country of France.
A successful and iconic design, the 5 nonetheless has its share of tragedy. Michel Boué died of cancer before it came to market, robbing Renault of a potentially very talented designer – grimly echoing the death of Pio Manzù, who was the designer of the Fiat 127 and who also died before it came to market.
In 1984 a new version was launched. The completely new Supercinq updated the styling and technologies for the new decade. Whether you prefer the original or sequel is a matter of taste, but the Supercinq was also successful and stayed in production until 1996 when it was replaced with the first generation Renault Clio.
As for the original 5 – it had a strange afterlife in Iran as the Renault PK which was an odd mashup of Renault and Kia parts. Also a rather curious an electric version of the original 5 was sold in the US during the 1970s and 1980s called the “Lectric Leopard”. Renault themselves demonstrated an electric concept version of the 5 in 2021, although whether the Renault 5 badge will ever see production again is questionable.
Second-generation "Supercinq" and Iranian Renault PK
As for significance – before the Renault 5 only a small few cars had hatchbacks, and afterwards pretty much all small cars followed suit with the extra door on the back. This basic configuration stayed popular well into the 21st century when it started to be replaced with larger and more unwieldy crossovers.
Today, unmolested hot hatch versions of any Renault 5 model can cost you £30,000 or much more with racing spec versions coming in at up to £100,000. More sedate versions of the original 5 are pretty hard to find these days, and even basic second-gen cars can go for a few thousand pounds. It seems the 5 still has it fans, even decades after launch.
Two unlikely stars of the silver (and small) screen, the Ford Crown Victoria and DMC DeLorean were launched a decade apart… and although they are very different cars, they are familiar to audiences the world over.
Let’s start with the most unlikely one – the Ford Crown Victoria. The first model of this car rolled off the production line in Canada in January 1991. A big and fairly bland-looking thing (the Americans call it a “full-sized sedan”) it had rear wheel drive and a 4.6 litre V8 engine – although this only ever produced a maximum of 250 horsepower on production cars.
Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor
But it was as a police car that the Crown Victoria found its fame. Massively popular with law enforcement throughout North America and also sold in the Middle East and Russia, the “Crown Vic” was durable, had lots of space, a decent amount of power and the street presence that a police car needs to be taken seriously.
Success in law enforcement was reflected in films and TV. The cops would drive a Crown Vic. Undercover FBI agents would hang around in an unmarked government plate Crown Vic. Whether it had police markings or not, the car ended up as something of an icon. And on the rare occasions it isn’t the law, the Crown Vic is also a popular choice for taxi drivers.
With some minor changes the Crown Vic stayed in production for 20 years, and despite being badly obsolete by 2011 it seems that police forces were reluctant to move on. Today, most of the Crown Vics on sale in the US are ex-police interceptors, many of which retain police colour schemes and are typically priced at $12,000 or less. Occasionally they are available in the UK and other countries having been personally imported. If ever you feel like remaking the Blues Brothers, then this car is probably for you.
The Crown Vic was a car aimed at the US market, but built in Canada. A decade earlier a very different car was aimed at the US market, but this time built in Northern Ireland. The DMC DeLorean (also called the DMC-12) was a two-seater sports car made famous by the DeLorean Time Machine in the Back to the Future Trilogy. But their relative paths to fame were very different.
Where the Crown Vic was a highly successful car in its niche, the DeLorean was frankly a disaster. Launched in 1981, it was only in production for just less than two years. A troubled development history compared with woeful quality control issues killed the company after only 9000 were built.
The history of the DeLorean is complicated and fascinating. The brainchild of ex-GM boss John Z DeLorean, the car was originally envisaged as a showcase for safety features using several highly advanced production techniques that had not been used before. These blue sky ideas were continually pared back as development proceeded.
Ultimately, what was delivered to customers had potential. The overall design of the car was penned by Giorgetto Giugiaro at Italdesign who – frankly – has designed some of the best-looking cars ever produced. The DeLorean had a clean, sleek design in bare stainless steel with gull-wing doors that gave the car plenty of “wow” factor. The tidy design continued inside, in an era when car interiors could be a thrown-together mess.
Early and late model DMC DeLoreans
Added to the genius of Giugiaro was the work of legendary Lotus founder, Colin Chapman. Chapman was brought in quite late to the project to re-engineer the car in a way that it could actually be built. Chapman’s design borrowed heavily from Lotus. Things were looking promising with these two names on board.
A sticking point was the engine – originally designed to be a Ford V6, DeLorean then looked to use a complete drivetrain from Citroën before settling on the V6 offering from Peugeot-Renault-Volvo, placed in the back rather than the mid-engined arrangement planned. Although this 2.85L V6 was a solid enough engine it only gave a moderate 130 horsepower, and the shift to the back of the car impacted the handling and overall stance.
Despite having big names on board, the production of the DeLorean was plagued with problems. The British government forked out a staggering £77 million to help build a car factory in Northern Ireland. Now, although Northern Ireland has a rich engineering history, especially in shipbuilding and aircraft, it basically had none at all when it came to cars. So, everything needed to be built from scratch, and employees needed comprehensive training. Predictably, this led to severe problems with build quality – and cars leaving the factory often required extensive remediation work to make them saleable.
Faults were numerous, resulting in many recalls, and the goodwill that customers had soon evaporated. And even if everything worked properly, the unpainted stainless steel panels were incredibly difficult to repair if they suffered damage – you couldn’t simply fill and paint – and the car was underpowered compared with rivals such as the Lotus Esprit.
Sales were weak and unsold cars began piling up. Just a year into production, DMC were in serious financial trouble. Financial restructuring, incentives and improvements in quality didn’t help. In October 1982 things took a weird turn when John DeLorean was arrested trying to traffic cocaine in order to generate money to prop up the company. DeLorean was later acquitted though, as details of the FBI’s sting operation undermined the prosecutor’s case.
By the end of 1982 it was all over, except for a large number of unsold and heavily discounted vehicles. Several of these ended up with Universal Studios where they were converted for filming the Back to the Future trilogy. By the time the film came out in 1985, the DeLorean was something of a joke. The movie trilogy transformed it into a cult car – and over the years many replica DeLorean time machines have been built on top of the original cars.
Today, prices for a DMC DeLorean range between £30,000 to £50,000. But it’s not an easy car to live with, but I suppose if you find it too troublesome you could always take it back to the time before you bought it..
..and for the record, the Internet Movie Cars Database has nearly 10,000 references for the Crown Vic and 165 for the DMC Delorean. Make up your own mind about which is the biggest star.
Microcomputers had been on a rollercoaster ride since the launch of the holy trinity of the Commodore PET, Apple II and Tandy TRS-80 in 1977. These early computers were expensive and limited in capabilities, so take-up was somewhat limited – especially in the home. But if there was one machine that finally brought the micro into living rooms and bedrooms all over the world, it was probably the Commodore VIC-20.
Commodore VIC-20
Selling more than a million units in its first year of production, the VIC-20 was based on the familiar (and Commodore-owned) MOS Technology 6502 CPU combined with a graphics-and-sound chip called the VIC which MOS had designed but had yet to find a market for.
Graphics were a fairly blocky 176 x 184 pixels in a maximum of 16 colours, with a fairly ungainly text resolution of 22 x 23 characters (at a time when business computers would have up to 80 columns) Sound was a slightly more impressive three channels plus a noise generator. A tiny 5Kb of RAM left just 3.5Kb for BASIC applications, but it could be expanded to 32Kb.
BASIC itself was a cut-down version of the one in the PET – a smaller codebase was needed because of the limited ROM and RAM in the VIC-20. Unfortunately this meant that the VIC-20 lacked any commands to control graphics or sound in BASIC which had to be done through a series of POKES and PEEKS. The later VIC Super Expander cartridge helped, but BASIC programs written using it could only be used by people owning the expander cartridge.
Everything was packaged in an attractive and durable single box costing a shade less than $300 which would need to be connected to a domestic TV set (via an external modulator) or composite video monitor… which wasn’t included in the price. Nor included was the almost-essential “datasette” cassette drive needed for storage, but even taking all this into consideration the price was a steal compared to the previous generation of computers. And in a bare-minimum configuration you could use the family TV and a software cartridge plugged into the back.
It was an expandable system – floppy disks and joysticks being a common option, but the built-in serial port and CBM-488 bus allowed a variety of other add-ons including the sub-$100 VICMODEM which sold over a million units.
VIC-20 plus peripherals
About a year-and-a-half later, the VIC-20’s successor was launched – the Commodore 64. Almost identical in exterior design, the C64 was a much more complex and expensive beast. The VIC continued to be sold alongside the C64, by the time it was discontinued in January 1985 (four years after launch) it was priced at less than $100.
The VIC-20 cemented Commodore as one of the key players in the early 80s microcomputer market, but of course that position wouldn’t last. Today a Commodore VIC-20 in very good condition can sell for up to £400, the VIC-compatible floppy disk units are much in demand and can also sell for hundreds of pounds. Alternatively, the Linux-based THEC64 includes a VIC-20 emulation mode in convincing replica hardware for much less.
At the start of 2010, the Apple iPhone had been on the market for two-and-a-half years and a bit of a slow start it was becoming rather popular, along with its rival Android platform.
But although modern smartphones were easy to use for some tasks, their small screens could be a pain. Go bigger and you might end up spending a lot of money on a notebook computer which would take ages to boot up.
There were other solutions, and as ever it was Nokia who were exploring them. The elegant Nokia Booklet 3G took and inexpensive small notebook design and added seamless 3G connectivity along with the advantages of a 10.1” display. And five years previously, Nokia had introduced something called an “Internet Tablet” with a relatively large 4.1” display running a version of Linux.
Nokia had all the technologies it needed to take the next step in personal computing, but it hadn’t put them together in the right way. However, in January 2010 Apple put together all the available technologies to come up with a product that people hadn’t realised that they actually wanted until that point – the Apple iPad.
Rumours had been flying around for a while about some tablet-based computer, but there were few solid details. In fact, the smart money seemed to be convinced that the device was going to be called the Apple iSlate (a trademark that Apple actually owned). But overall Apple's veil of secrecy about the new device held.
The iPad was as easy to use as the iPhone but had a 9.7” display, was just 13mm thick and weighed only around 700 grams. Priced at between $499 for the basic 16GB WiFi-only version to $829 for a 64GB one with 3G they weren’t exactly cheap, but they were still good value compared to a lot of laptops.
Of course, the iPad lacked a keyboard or mouse (but it didn’t take long for Bluetooth keyboards to come out), however the main flaw with the iPad was that it didn’t support multitasking, so you couldn’t run multiple apps at once. This was eventually fixed in iOS 4.2 launched in November 2010, but to begin with it was certainly a handicap.
Regardless of the flaws it may have had, the iPad launched in a blaze of publicity and it was a massive hit – selling 15 million units before the launch of the iPad 2. Unusually for Apple, it had only a short lifespan for software updates with the last OS upgrade coming out in May 2012.
Several generations later and the iPad is still a strong seller, however sales peaked in about 2013 and have been in decline ever since. Part of this apparent decline is probably due to smartphones becoming more capable – the iPhone 11 Pro Max has a 6.5” display for example – and also people replace tablets less often. Despite many competitors coming along (and mostly failing) Apple still has more than a third of the market it essentially created.
By the start of 2010 the Android platform had been around for fifteen months but some cracks were beginning to appear in Google’s strategy to revolutionise the smartphone industry. Part of the problem was that manufacturers were trying to customise the OS rather too much which was leading to fragmentation, they were also very poor at providing software updates and prices for higher-end devices were quite expensive.
Microsoft had suffered a similar problem with their Windows phones – weakness in the user interface with that operating system had resulting in different manufacturers reskinning the OS to make it more appealing. This meant that your experience with a Windows phone from HTC would very different to one made from Samsung or Motorola. This was a problem that rivals Apple and Nokia didn’t have because they completely controlled both the OS and the hardware.
Google’s response to this was the Google Nexus One, a device made for them by HTC. Competing in part with the iPhone 3GS, the Nokia 5800 and a multitude of Android and Windows phones, the Nexus One beat most of them when it came to both hardware and software. The 3.7” 480 x 800 pixel AMOLED display beat almost everything else in its class, the 5 megapixel camera was pretty good and the whole package looked attractive even if the styling betrayed that it was an HTC underneath.
Initially the idea was that Google would sell the Nexus One to consumers at $530 or €370, which was good value for a high-end SIM-free smartphone at the time. However back in 2010 customers were cool on the idea, preferring to get their phones subsidised with a contract.
Despite the attractions of the device, sales were slow. Google shifted away from direct sales in mid-2010 and tried to attract carriers to the device, with only a moderate amount of success. Customers were unhappy with the quality of the OLED screen to begin with, the Nexus One was modified for a more traditional Super LCD display a few months in (although this was mostly down to manufacturing issues). There wasn’t much in the way of marketing either, so while mobile phone fans might have known about it... many others didn’t.
But still, the Nexus One was meant to set an example to other manufacturers about how to do it and to some extent sales were not important. The other thing that Google wanted to do was show that software updates could be done quickly, rather than dragging on more months with other manufacturers (especially handsets tied to carriers). And Google were as good as their word, updates hit the Nexus One very quickly and everyone was happy… right up until the point that Google announced that the Nexus One wouldn’t be getting an upgrade to Android Ice Cream Sandwich in October 2011 because the hardware was “too old”. This was for a phone that was less than two years old and was now effectively on the scrapheap – and just as a comparison, the contemporary Apple iPhone 3GS ended up with software updates for five years.
Despite all of these woes, Google stuck with the Nexus project with a variety of partners such as Samsung, ASUS, Motorola and HTC (again), LG - with the final Nexus model being built by Huawei in 2015. After that, Google dropped the Nexus devices and instead brought out a more expensive range called the Google Pixel to somewhat mixed reviews and moderate success.
Google’s involvement in Android got more complicated when they bought Motorola’s mobile phone businesses a year after the launch of the Nexus One, only to asset strip it of patents and sell the desiccated husk to Lenovo in 2014. In 2018 Google bought part of HTC but as yet haven't turned this fading company around. Overall, Google’s foray into producing its own handsets was probably not the decisive influence that Google wanted it to be. Would it have made any real difference if they hadn't bothered?
The Digital PDP-11 is a computer you may not have heard of, but it was hugely influential in terms of hardware and even more so in the software that it helped to create.
Digital Equipment Corporation (typically known as DEC or Digital) was founded in 1957, first tinkering with electronics for laboratory environments and then producing a full computer system in 1959 with the PDP-1 minicomputer. Other models followed and DEC grew quickly through the 1960s with a wide range of new products including the very successful PDP-8.
The term “minicomputer” is rarely used these days, and by modern standard there was nothing mini about them. Often house in racks and sometimes filling a small room, minicomputers were shrunk down versions of the huge mainframe computers that tended to require their own building. Even as microcomputers became popular, minicomputers were much more powerful and made it easier for people to work collaboratively, these days their modern descendant would be a server. Typically you would access a minicomputer with a terminal such as a VT52.
Time and technology move on and by the late 1960s the computer industry started to settle on 8, 16 and 32 bit architecture (based on an 8-bit word size) where Digital was mostly producing 12, 18 and 36 bit machines (based on a 6-bit word size). In part this change happened because the computer industry was starting to standardise on the 7-bit ASCII character set.
In January 1970, DEC launched its first 16-bit minicomputer – the PDP-11. Combining the extensive experience of the company from the previous decade (both good and bad), the PDP-11 was a high usable and expandable system. A key feature of the PDP-11 was that it was relatively easy to program, especially when it came to using peripherals (initially on the Unibus bus and later Q-Bus). And peripherals were available from DEC in abundance, including disk drives, tapes drives, printers and terminals.
From the outset the PDP-11 was a huge success, starting with the original 11/20 and 11/15 models in 1970 and then developing along with advancing technologies to become smaller and more powerful, ending with the 11/93 and 11/94 in 1990 (which were in production until 1997). But PDP-11 systems ended up being squeezed into other “smart” peripherals too such as robot arms and when added to a terminal such as the VT100 they could make a compact desktop version (such as the VT103). DEC even tried to make a PDP-11 to compete with the IBM PC with the DEC Professional range.
Perhaps confusingly DEC had many operating systems for the PDP-11, notably RT-11. However the most famous OS that the PDP-11 is famous for is Unix – a platform that was developed at Bell Labs in response to the complex Multics OS. In fact, Unix was tied to the PDP-11 platform until 1978 when it was finally ported to a fairly obscure system called the Interdata 8/32.
Unix became an enormous success – it took a while – and today descendants and variants of that OS power smartphones, servers and personal computers worldwide. But the PDP-11 hardware too was hugely influential, directly inspiring 1970s processors such as the Motorola 68000 and Intel 8086.
DEC sold hundreds of thousands of PDP-11s while it was in production, making it possibly the most popular minicomputer ever made. The 32-bit DEC VAX launched in 1977 was meant to be the next logical step, however both the PDP-11 and VAX ended up being sold in parallel.
In terms of both software and hardware the PDP-11 was a hugely significant device, even if most people may never have seen one. Surprisingly it seems some are still in use, and there’s a brisk trade in parts and components on the second hard market.
By the start of the 1980s, the microcomputer revolution had been in full swing for a few years. However, price remained a problem – generally speaking even basic systems could run into thousands of dollars or pounds when you added in all the bits and pieces you needed.
This meant that many people couldn’t afford to get involved in this new field, especially in the UK where disposable income at the end of the 1970s was quite small compared to the US. So, Clive Sinclair tackled the issue of affordability head-on to come up with a uniquely British computer that went on to spawn some even more successful offspring.
Sinclair had been dabbling in all sorts of high-tech gadgets for some years, and in 1978 had come up with a low-cost board computer called the MK14. This very simple little computer showed that there was a market for this type of device, so Sinclair’s firm – Science of Cambridge – set to work on something more usable, the Sinclair ZX80.
When it was launched in January 1980, the ZX80 came in ready-built form for a shade under £100. If you wanted to solder it together yourself you could save £20 on top of that. Then, all you would need was a TV, cassette recorder and a couple of cables to make a complete system.
Measuring 22 x 18cm it was about two-thirds of the size of an A4 sheet of paper – a fact that surprised many customers who bought one by mail order who expected it to be somewhat bigger. Despite the diminutive form factor, the ZX80 was an exceptionally elegant design. A blue-on-back membrane keyboard housed in a futuristic white case with “SINCLAIR ZX80” boldly emblazoned across it, the exterior design was the work of the late Rick Dickinson who went on to work on many other Sinclair projects.
Inside were just 21 chips including a Zilog Z80 compatible processor and 1KB of RAM. RAM could be extended to 16KB by using a “RAM Pack” that plugged into the edge connector on the back of the machine. There was no sound and the monochrome output only supported uppercase characters and some simple predefined block graphics. BASIC was built-in to the computer along with some pretty good documentation, so it was possible to get started on the ZX80 straight away and start doing some coding. As with a calculator, each key had many different functions – for example, almost all the BASIC keywords were generated by a single key press.
It had its flaws – primarily the way the display went blank when the computer was processing, and poor ventilation meant that the ZX80 was prone to overheating (the black slots that look like cooling vents are in fact merely cosmetic). However, Science of Cambridge sold around 100,000 units in a lifespan of just over a year and the machine was so popular that there were significant waiting lists.
The ZX81 followed in 1981, which was almost identical in overall architecture but had a lower chip count, more features and crucially was cheaper. In 1982 Sinclair launched the ZX Spectrum, and between them these inexpensive compact computers sold in their millions.
Despite selling so many machines, the ZX80 is a rare beast these days. Typical prices for a complete working system are around £600 or so, quite a bit more than it would have cost in real terms. Alternatively you can buy a modern kit such as the Minstrel and assemble one yourself for much less.
DEC were a pioneer in business computing, bringing powerful computers to medium-size business with minicomputers such as the VAX series (launched in 1977), hooked up to a dumb terminal.
In the twelve years since launch the VAX line had continued to grow and evolve with the times, but during the latter half of the 1980s it was becoming apparent that the underlying architecture was perhaps not what was needed for the 1990s.
Computer manufacturers were beginning to produce machines with more streamlined processors – Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC). High-performance CPUs were also being seen in microcomputers such as the Acorn Archimedes, but in particular the Sun SPARC processor was powering a new generation of Unix workstations which were competing successfully against DEC’s own business.
In January 1989, DEC announced the DECstation, their own take on a RISC-based Unix workstation. Unlike the DEC-designed VAX processor, the DECstation used a CPU bought in from MIPS. The original DECstation 3100 introduced in January 1989 was three times quicker than its VAX CISC-based counterpart, and given that DEC’s version of Unix (called Ultrix) was already a mature and widely-used product on VAXes it seemed that the DECstation had what it took to be successful.
Specifically, DEC was aiming the DECstation at the low-cost server and workstation markets. Both of these device classes were offshoots of the minicomputer that DEC had helped to pioneer. Much more powerful than PCs of the time, the DECstation and its competitors introduced technologies that didn’t find themselves onto most people’s desks until a decade later.
The DECstation could certainly have been a contender, but DEC itself was never really happy with a product that wasn’t 100% DEC all the way down, and after a couple of years of development DEC quietly abandoned the platform, instead switching to the DEC Alpha CPU in boxes such as the DEC 3000 AXP. However, MIPS-based DECstations were still commonly in use and supported by DEC throughout the 1990s.
They’re not the first thing you might think of as a collectable, but people do and a used base unit can cost around $500 or so if you are interesting in tinkering with redundant Unix hardware..
It’s easy to forget that recording TV shows 20 years ago was a major hassle for most people. VHS recorders could typically record just three to five hours in a strictly linear fashion. If you wanted to record from cable or a satellite box then it was tricky, and in any case if the show was running late for any reason you would miss it at least part of it. You also couldn’t watch something that you had already recorded while you were recording something else.
TiVo Roamio DVR with characteristic remote controller
The introduction of TiVo in 1999 helped to change all that. Ditching the tape, the TiVo recorded on a hard disk which could initially store 35 hours of programming, but this quickly increased. You record and play back at the same time, pause live TV and the integrated Electronic Program Guide (EPG) made it much easier to find shows in listings and could help to prevent missed recordings. Some models integrated satellite or cable receivers too, an essential modern feature for many.
Twenty years on and time shifting and binge watching whole recorded series has become pretty commonplace, and although online services such as Netflix are eating into traditional broadcasting’s market share, TiVo’s fifth- and sixth-generation boxes now support those too, along with up to six tuners and 3 terabytes of storage. Would you want to try doing the same thing with a VHS VCR? Probably not...
When Palm launched their Palm Pre smartphone half a decade ago, we were quite excited. Perhaps this was the phone that would have wowed consumers and changed the market forever. If it had been launched two years previously, that is.
Today, we still think the same. The Palm Pre was a brilliantly unique smartphone, which despite a few rough edges gave a user experience that was superior to anything else at the time. Designed from the ground up to be an easy-to-use multitasking operating system, the Pre’s webOS environment ran different apps as “cards” that users could swipe between easily. Comprehensive email support (which was important at the time), a decent web browser and even a reasonably large selection of apps were all available, combined with a cute curved design which made the Pre look very different from the rival iPhone. And it had wireless charging too, which was certainly a novelty for the time, and a physical keyboard set it apart from Apple's offering too.
Palm had been a pioneer – perhaps the pioneer – in early handheld computing. The Palm Pilot (launched in 1996) dominated that market segment, to the extent that the phrase “Palm Pilot” was sometimes applied to any PDA. But the rise of early smartphones such as the Sony Ericsson P900 effectively killed off standalone PDAs, and it took a while for Palm to respond with its range of PalmOS-based Treo smartphones that it acquired from rival firm Handspring.
A move into Windows phones hadn’t provided the boost that Palm was looking for, so they started to develop a completely new operating system called webOS. When it was launched in January 2009 along with the Pre, Palm still had enough market presence to have the phone dubbed an “iPhone killer” by the press (spoiler alert: it wasn’t).
Although the software environment was promising, the hardware was pretty shoddy. Palm fans who decided to be loyal to the brand were rewarded with brittle screens and cases, and keys and control sliders that would break or malfunction. This did not help sales.
The competition was also getting serious – the iPhone was in its second generation with the much improved 3GS on the way, HTC had already kick-started the Android market and Samsung was on the verge of releasing its first Galaxy smartphone. And if you didn’t want either of those, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic was a pretty accomplished alternative. And all of those rivals had more apps to choose from than the Pre.
As good as it was – and even with the goodwill of Palm fans – the Pre was neither a success nor a failure. The Palm Pre 2 (launched nearly 2 years later) fixed many of those faults, but it was really just the product that Palm should have launched four years earlier. Even with the weight of new owners HP behind it, the entire line was heading for extinction.
WebOS eventually ended up with LG, who use it in smart TVs and other appliances, and the Palm name lives under today with the peculiar Palm Palm, made under licence by TCL who also build BlackBerry and Alcatel smartphones. Collectors of esoteric devices might be interested to know that the various generations of Pre can be picked up for between £10 to £50.
The follow-up to the successful and stylish T610, the Sony Ericsson T630 was a product of a partnership that was beginning to find its feet and come up with its own design language. An elegant candy-bar phone, the T630 had all the fashionable features you’d find in a mid-noughties feature phone, wrapped up in one of the best looking handsets designed up until that point.
One of the key problems with the T610 was the rather muddy STN display, but the T630 came with a beautifully clear TFT instead. On the back was a basic CIF resolution camera that had been tweaked to give VGA resolution pictures. Somewhat atypically for handsets in this price range the T630 had Bluetooth, it also supported Java downloadable games and customisable polyphonic ringtones.
But it was the way that the T630 looked that attracted attention, with the white version in a translucent case being a particular hit. The understated design showed attention to detail with a distinctive Scandinavian flavour, and it set a benchmark that future Sony Ericsson phones would use in terms of design language.
This combination of features and styling was a big hit with consumers, and the T630 continued the T610’s sales success, making Sony Ericsson a serious contender in this slice of the market for a time. The long battery life and reliability of the T630 also won fans, and many people clung onto their T630s for a long time.
If you are after a slice of nostalgia, the T630 can cost as little as £10 in good condition and there are a range of accessories that can be found do go with it such as car mounts, docking stations and even spare parts.
It’s one of the stand-out phone in the history of handset disasters – announced five years ago this month the BlackBerry Z10 was a catastrophic failure that very nearly killed its maker. Sitting squarely on the downward slope of BlackBerry’s status of a darling of the technology industry to a company that people are surprised is still in business, the Z10 and companion Q10 deserve to be looked at once more.
A brief history lesson – BlackBerry was called Research in Motion (RIM) when it was founded in 1984. During the 1980s and early 1990s, RIM explored markets in communications and point-of-sale devices. In the later 1990s, RIM diversified into two-way pagers which led to the BlackBerry 850 in 1999, followed by email-enabled smartphones such as the BlackBerry 6230 in the early 2000s.
What started out life as a product appealing to large corporations ended up – somewhat by chance – as being an enormous consumer hit, fuelled in part by devices such as the BlackBerry Pearl smartphone. Even the launch of the iPhone in 2007 couldn’t stop RIM’s growth, and in 2011 it had sales of an astonishing $19.9 billion, compared to just $595 million in 2004.
BlackBerry 850, 6230, Pearl 8100
But although BlackBerry devices were always superlative when it came to email, they were pretty terrible when it came to other things – especially web browsing. As the impact of iOS and Android smartphones began to change the way people used the web, the clunky interface of BlackBerry devices was off-putting.
Sure, BlackBerry had tried to improve things but by 2011 had pushed their old platform as far as it could go with the BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900. But too many elements of the operating system were unchanged from the 6230 nearly a decade earlier. RIM had tried an all-touch device as early as 2008 with the BlackBerry Storm 9500 which turned out to be catastrophically awful and very buggy. Despite RIM’s best efforts to put lipstick on a pig, consumers could still tell that it was a pig.
BlackBerry Storm 9500, Bold Touch 9900
RIM had been aware that their products were becoming increasingly uncompetitive and by 2010 they embarked on a project to adapt the Unix-like QNX operating system into a mobile OS good enough to fight back against Apple and Google. QNX was designed to be a real-time operating system, and had (and indeed still has) a reputation for stability and reliability – and best of all as far as RIM were concerned, they already owned QNX.
The first QNX-based product to be announced was the BlackBerry Playbook. Despite initial promise, the Playbook was deeply flawed and full of bugs. Customers stayed away in their droves, but it did at least show that QNX had the right potential.
BlackBerry continued to work in turning QNX into the BlackBerry 10 operating system that their next-generation phones would need, but it took over two years after the launch of the Playbook to finally announce their new BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 smartphones, which they did in January 2013.
To put this in context – the original Apple iPhone had been launched six years previously in January 2007 (a line that had progressed all the way to the iPhone 5) and Android devices had been selling in increasingly large numbers for four years. RIM (who changed their name at this point to BlackBerry) were very, very late entrants into this market, and the Z10 and Q10 would need to be something special.
Black BlackBerry Z10
Although both products were announced at the same time, the Z10 and Q10 would not ship at the same time. The Z10 was a conventional-looking touchscreen smartphone with a decent hardware specification. The Q10 on the other hand was much more BlackBerry-like with a QWERTY keyboard, but it still featured a touchscreen and the new BlackBerry 10 operating system.
BlackBerry 10 was a radical departure from most smartphone operating systems when it came to the user interface. Lacking any button the whole things was based on a series of different swipes (rather like the modern iPhone X). It was a steep learning curve for BlackBerry users, and it wasn’t a surprise to find out that it had some serious bugs at launch. There were also only a small number of native applications for it, which was hardly going to tempt people away from other platforms.
The fact that the Z10 was released months before the Q10 was the result of huge infighting at RIM, with management divided over whether to launch the all-screen one first, or the one with a more traditional design. This process reportedly pushed back the launch of either device by a full year. And history pretty much proved that the Z10 was the wrong decision, because BlackBerry customers who wanted something like that had long ago defected to rivals, and the Z10 failed to appeal to traditionalists who wanted a physical QWERTY keyboard.
The Z10 bombed. It didn’t appeal to either existing or new customers, and it turns out that BlackBerry had built a lot of them in order to meet demand that never materialised, leading to a billion-dollar write off of inventory. Sales continued to collapse, losses began to mount and the stock price cratered. Senior management were thrown out, to be replaced by managers who would also eventually be thrown out. Most industry observers agreed that BlackBerry was doomed.
It didn't help when BlackBerry "brand ambassador" Alicia Keys was caught Tweeting from her Apple device either.
BlackBerry? Alcatel? TCL?
Lost among this was the Q10 which now had become toxic because of the failure of the Z10. Customers were buying phones from BlackBerry, but they were just the Curves and Bolds that they had been buying for years.
BlackBerry seemed doomed, but its enormous cash pile and a stubbornness to die means that it is still is business today, but with a very different business model. Handset production is licensed to TCL who base current BlackBerry devices on designs they sell under the Alcatel brand (oddly enough, licensed from Nokia) and who also bought the Palm brand from HP. Current BlackBerry devices run Android with a BlackBerry software stack on top… which is probably what BlackBerry should have done all along.
Had either the Z10 or Q10 hit the market three or four years earlier then they might have made the impact that BlackBerry needed. In the end, they were so late to the party that there was really no point in turning up at all.
Z10s are currently widely available for less than €100, and BlackBerry are committed to supporting the handset until 2020 and the software these days is *much* better (and you can load Android apps). The Q10 is a bit cheaper. If you like collecting heroic failures, then perhaps either (or both) devices are for you.
Image credits: RIM / BlackBerry
Video
If you really want more of the Z10 and Q10, here are a pair of videos we prepared much earlier..
In January 1988, a top-of-the-range portable computer such as the Compaq Portable III would have cost about $5000 or £2700 at the time (and about twice as much in modern money). Amstrad set off to create something that could do much of the same thing, but at a fraction of the cost.
Initially the Amstrad PPC 512 was shown at CES in Las Vegas in January 1988. Costing about a quarter of the price of the Compaq, the PPC 512 was indeed a computer that you could move about from place to place and it even had its own integrated LCD monitor. And it was about a million miles away from what we would consider to be a portable computer today.
The hardware was largely based on the existing PC1512 and PC1640 desktops, but where they had a compact 85-key keyboard the PPC (portable PC) went for a full 102 keys which is essentially the same full-sized keyboard you’d see on a PC today (with a few extra buttons). Given that you couldn’t even fit a 102-key keyboard to the desktop PCs, it was an odd design decision.
Odder still was the tiny 9” LCD screen perched on the very left edge of the case, meaning that whoever was typing on the huge keyboard would always find it annoyingly offset. The display itself was pretty poor even by the crummy standard of late 1980s LCD screens, but you could hook an external CGA monitor up if you wanted.
The PPC 512 had 512KB of RAM, the PPC 640 had 640KB and a built-in modem in a darker case. Both machines were available in single or twin-floppy configurations, although frustratingly for Amstrad users these were superior 3.5” 720KB drives rather than the 5.25” 360KB drives on the desktop machines. Power could be provided by an external PSU, a whopping set of 10 C-cells (for one hour’s run-time) or from plugging it into an Amstrad proprietary monitor. Amstrad made a large carrying bag that it would all fit into.
An optional expansion box could provide a hard disk and expansion cards, but in those days most people could fit the operating system, application and data on a single floppy with some work. Hard disks were fearsomely expensive in those days as well, and 1980s-era hard disks were notoriously fragile and could suffer catastrophic failures if the heads were not parked prior to transport.
Sinclair PC200
Weighing 5.4Kg, the PPC was quite luggable and the built-in modem in the PPC 640 made it very appealing for certain types of customer. But overall the PPC range was not a success despite a creditable attempt to build something useful with the available technology at a price people could afford. An attempt to repackage the PPC as a home computer (the Amstrad PC20 and Sinclair PC200) again came up with an interesting but commercially unsuccessful design.
The PPC and its derivatives are rare and quite collectible today, with prices for complete systems running into several hundred pounds. Amstrad tried to break into the portable computing market a couple more times with the ALT in 1990 and ANB in 1991, but ultimately this was one market that they never managed to crack.
