Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Saturation point, and Nintendo and Sega, were just around the corner

Remember the excitement of leafing through a catalog for home computer bargains? Or perhaps gazing longingly at festive tech displays in Britain's WH Smith (or ComputerLand if you lived Stateside)? Take a step back to 1984 and the last great hurrah of the home computer.

The video game crash of 1983 had already happened in the US, but the UK's home computer market was still buoyant in 1984, even if the cracks of over-saturation were already starting to show. This writer, glued to the BBC's television production of The Box of Delights, certainly didn't realize it at the time.

A browse through the pages of the 1984 booklet from famous Brit catalog retailer Argos shows computers from Atari alongside the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The shelves of retailers were packed with products from manufacturers that, in hindsight, were perhaps a bit over-optimistic.

Still, in 1984, UK consumers were spoiled for choice. As well as Sinclair's products, the BBC Micro was available alongside the Acorn Electron. There were new computers from Commodore in the form of the Plus/4 and Commodore 16.


PJ Evans, Sinclair curator at The National Museum of Computing, recalled those heady days: "Sir Clive's dream of the ZX Spectrum as an educational and business computer had given way to a computer gaming explosion.

"Young developers, whose legacies are very much still with us now, had started to figure out how to push these machines well beyond their advertised limits," he told The Register.

Evans recalled home computers "had now truly gone mainstream, leaving the geeks such as myself still staring as BASIC printouts as the cool kids destroyed their joysticks playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon."

Or ruined the keyboards of a computer ostensibly bought "for the family."

However, while it might not have been obvious to consumers of the time, the wheels were starting to come off for hardware manufacturers. Texas Instruments had already infamously ditched its home computer, the TI99/4a. Other companies, such as Dragon Data – responsible for introducing the Dragon 32 and 64 to the UK market – collapsed in 1984.

Things were even starting to look a little dicey for Sinclair, which had struggled to bring the ZX Spectrum's high-end counterpart, the QL, to market. Both the Acorn Electron and Commodore's Plus/4 and 16 would be discontinued in 1985.

In the background, the IBM PC and its clones were gaining traction. The Apple Mac had also arrived and was capturing the imagination of customers, even if the price tag was off-putting.

In the UK, Christmas 1984 marked the last hurrah for the home computer market as it once was.

Some manufacturers would carry on for a while longer. Atari would go on to release the ST, competing with Commodore's Amiga, which endured into the 1990s. Both companies maintained their legacy systems for a few more years. Sinclair Research ran into financial difficulties in 1985 and was eventually sold to Amstrad, which had just introduced its own CPC computers, starting with the 464 in 1984.

Despite the Electron fiasco, Acorn continued on for a few more years, thanks partly to financing from Olivetti and to the majority share of the education market occupied by the BBC Micro. However, the company's grip on UK schools loosened as parents wondered about the point of having the company's computers in classrooms while the IBM PC and its compatibles were beginning to dominate the workplace.

Lurking behind the scenes were Nintendo and Sega. Nintendo's Famicom was released in Japan in 1983, and a redesigned version was launched in European markets in 1986. Sega's Master System arrived on European shores in 1987.

After Christmas 1984, the UK home computer market was saturated, leaving the way clear for dedicated game machines to render existing hardware obsolete. After all, most home computers were used for playing games, so why bother with fripperies such as keyboards? Games like Elite and Knight Lore were welcome shots in the arm, but the writing was on the wall. The industry had just yet to fully comprehend it until 1985 brought an unwelcome reality check.

Evans remembered the post-1984-era as heralding the mainstream arrival of 16-bit home computers - yes, the TI99/4 and 4a had a 16-bit CPU, but were arguably still an 8-bit system - in the form of the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, although neither was able to recreate the thrill of their predecessors.

"Still, for a while yet, we could enjoy our beige palettes and color clash as over the country kids tried to wrestle control of the TV from their bemused parents," he said.

Companies such as Raspberry Pi have attempted to recapture the glory days of the early 1980s with machines such as the Pi 400 and the recently released Pi 500, which scratch that computer-in-a-keyboard itch.

While Pi supremo Eben Upton was a little young for the golden era of UK home computing, he recalled playing games on a friend's ZX Spectrum in 1986 and the arrival of an Apricot Xen running Windows 1.0.

He recalled, "I bought a very second-hand BBC Micro (a partially upgraded Model A, with at least one dodgy RAM chip!) in 1989, and an Amiga 600 in 1992, just in time to watch Commodore follow in Acorn and Sinclair's footsteps.

"One memory speaks most clearly to the ethos of the 1980s: I bought an AMS mouse from Watford Electronics [a British computer company notable at the time for peripherals] because I wanted to try to write a window system (too much time spent on that Xen, and ogling the Archimedes in Micro User).

"It arrived on its own in a box, with no instructions and no software, and when my dad called Watford to ask what I was supposed to do, he was told that if I couldn't write a mouse driver, I didn't deserve a mouse.

"And that was how I came to write my first interrupt service routine in 6502 assembler."

For anyone who did not live through it, it is difficult to recall a time when such a diverse range of architecture and hardware was available. It is not surprising that a thriving retro scene now exists to keep the aging equipment running.

Christmas 1984 was arguably the last gasp for the golden age of the home computer industry in the UK. The various pieces of hardware and keyboards attached to the family television didn't disappear overnight, and software continued to be released, but changes were afoot that are still felt today, four decades later.

Source: https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/28/christmas_1984_home_computers/