The ZX80 achieved its aim, in that you got a "real computer" for less than £100 but geeks like me were already familiar with much better machines. The personal computer revolution had started to target the mass market three years earlier in the US with the launch of the Apple II and Tandy TRS-80 in 1977. These were soon followed by the Atari 400 and 800 in 1979, the Tandy Color Computer in 1980, plus the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A and Commodore VIC-20 in 1981, among others.
The Atari home computers, for example, had sprite-based colour graphics for fast games, sophisticated sound chips, four joystick ports, plug-in cartridges for instant loading, and memory banks expandable to 48K. Add-ons for the TI-99/4A included a speech synthesiser and a 300-baud modem so you could go online.
In the UK, these American systems were usurped by the Acorn BBC Models A and B, released late in 1981 at £299 and £399 respectively. The BBC B had 32K of memory, a proper case and keyboard, a superb version of Basic, and seemed almost infinitely expandable: you could even link them in Econet networks. It could do real word processing and other business tasks, as well as play games such as Elite.
The Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 were successful in being cheap, but they failed at being useful or usable. Most buyers would have been better off saving up for something better, or waiting for the arrival of the Commodore 64 or indeed Sinclair's own Spectrum.
Jack Schofield, Guardian computer editor
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