Photograph: Future Publishing/Future/Getty ImagesĪvailable via mail order for just $400 (a fraction of the cost of commercial computers at the time) and built around the 2MHz Intel 8080 CPU, the Altair effectively kickstarted the home microcomputer industry.
It was initially well supported with games, many of them converted from the Beeb, but it was costly to manufacture and too sensible to really trouble the puckish Speccy. Acorn Electron (1983)ĭesigned to compete with the ZX Spectrum, the Electron was a budget version of the BBC Micro, using the same Synertek 6502A processor and operating system, and similar BASIC language. A legendary digital music machine thanks to its built-in Midi interface, the Atari struggled to compete as a games platform. The first home computer to feature a colour graphical user interface and powered by a 16-bit Motorola 68000 CPU, with 512KB of RAM, the Atari ST seemed like the future … until the Commodore Amiga arrived two months later. Despite this, Dragon Data went bust in 1984. Admittedly, I put the Dragon on the list instead of another great Swansea-made machine, the Sam Coupe, because I designed two hit games for the system: Impossiball and Utopia. However, its eccentric graphics hardware gave every game a garish green tinge, and its most iconic gaming character was a bespectacled schoolboy named Cuthbert. Manufactured by Swansea-based Dragon Data (an offshoot of traditional toy company, Mettoy), this 32k machine featured an advanced Motorola MC6809E central processor, decent keyboard and excellent analogue joypads.
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