First Computer
Whoo-hoo!
I'm the first on the thread to have owned the little known (in America) BBC Microcomputer. With a storming 32k
it was Sinclair's main rival in the UK. It was, however, much better although it was also more expensive. It dominated the education market (sound familiar?) as well.
Despite using the by then ancient 6502, it had an excellent OS including a powerful structured basic on ROM, good
graphics, embedded machine code capability and some advanced features including procedures (as opposed to subroutines), WHILE, UNTIL and ELSE and other high level statements, direct OS calls, a 1 Mgz bus(!), built in networking which could download software from the BBC TV channel, and the TUBE: proprietary technology that allowed a second processor - dual processors in 1982!
It never caught on in the US, partly because the company refused to license the technology. Take heed, Steve!
It did, however, go on to pioneer RISC based computing for the home user, and spawned the ARM processor range, which you will find in a lot of PDAs today.
I use a PowerBook G3 today. A little underspecced but able to do all I require and more. I was thinking of getting a new Mac, but am wary as after the iMac, I suspect there are several more releases to come in the near future, so I don't want to buy a soon to be discontinued model.
