Items19The creator’s order
  1. 1Commodore PETCommodore PETThe PET 2001 arrived as one sealed unit, with a monochrome screen showing 40 columns of text, a cassette recorder built into the case and a keyboard, so nothing had to be wired together before you typed your first line of BASIC. It was the brainchild of Chuck Peddle, the engineer behind the 6502…0
  2. 2Apple IIApple IIFew computers lasted like this one. First sold in June 1977 and not retired until 1993, the Apple II family sold about six million machines, so a collector can choose anything from an early original to a late, more capable model and still run a huge library. What makes it rewarding today is the…0
  3. 3TRS-80TRS-80TRS-80 Model I Radio Shack's first desktop computer put a ready-made system on the shelves of an ordinary electronics chain. It cost $599.95 with a Z80 processor, 4 KB of memory, a video display, BASIC built in and cassette storage, and it sold 10,000 units in its first month. That store network…0
  4. 4Atari 8-bit computersAtari 8-bit computersAtari 400 and 800 Atari's home computer division launched this pair in 1979 with custom chips that left rivals looking plain: ANTIC and CTIA (later GTIA) for graphics and POKEY for four channels of sound. The design team included Jay Miner, who went on to help design the Amiga 1000, so these…0
  5. 5VIC-20VIC-20Commodore's color home computer reached American stores in 1981 at $299.95, and repeated price cuts, taking it below $100 by 1983, pushed home computing toward impulse-buy territory. It sold about 2.5 million units. Be clear-eyed about the memory. Only 3.5K of RAM is free for your own programs…0
  6. 6ZX81ZX81Sinclair launched the ZX81 in March 1981 at £49.95 as a kit or £69.95 ready-assembled, and more than a million found homes, most of them built in Dundee, Scotland, by Timex. Few machines did more to put a computer within reach of an ordinary British household. Owning one now is about the…0
  7. 7TI-99/4ATI-99/4ATexas Instruments built its home computer around a 16-bit TMS9900 processor, derived from its own minicomputer line, at a time when its rivals ran 8-bit chips. It launched in 1981 at $525, and by 1983 a price war with Commodore had TI selling it at a loss for under $100. TI announced its exit that…0
  8. 8BBC MicroBBC MicroBuilt by Acorn for the BBC's Computer Literacy Project and released in December 1981, this was the machine a generation of British students met at school. It was announced at £235 for the Model A and £335 for the Model B, though both prices rose almost at once, and more than 1.5 million were…0
  9. 9ZX SpectrumZX SpectrumZX Spectrum 16K and 48K The Spectrum arrived in April 1982 at £125 for the 16K model and £175 for the 48K, later cut to £99 and £129, and more than five million were sold. That low price helped pave the way for home computer games as we know them, and it is why the software library is so…0
  10. 10Commodore 64Commodore 64Launched in August 1982, the Commodore 64 sold somewhere between 12.5 and 17 million units by independent estimates, and its library is so big that a collector can spend years in it. The reason people still talk about it is the SID sound chip, which gave C64 music a character all its own, and 64K…0