Magazines of Yesteryear - What Micro? - January 1988

What other way for What Micro? to celebrate its fifth birthday than with a declaration of the top ten business machines then available on the market. Given the date, you might be surprised by one or two of the selections, but hey, it was the 80's, and a time that, for computer fans in the UK at least, meant that the 16-bit generation was beginning to hit its stride. 

But first, the news...

Amstrad had launched their portable range, although at 12lbs, the PPC's stretched the definition of portable. Starting at £399 ex for a single floppy, 512Kb model, rising to £499 ex for 640Kb, and an extra £100 each for another floppy (which would make life a hell of a lot easier), these were very competitively priced. That the PPC640 rocked a 2,400 baud modem was a cherry on top. Sure, the LCD was crap, and the keyboard simply mediocre, but if you had to have a computer for use at points A, B and beyond, they did the job.  

Just as Epson's portable could, and with a smaller, but not overly lighter, form factor. There again, that would set you back £1,395 where as a similarly spec'd PPC640 would do you for £599. You pays your money and all that...

The same goes for Apple, and a lot of money too! Even with cuts of up to £300, a hard disk equipped SE would still leave you £2,895 worse off, although the basic Plus was £200 lighter at £1,795 - a veritable bargain... Of the more expandable Mac II, this was a case of there being coughs, near and far. A mono HD model for £5,195 was definitely a far cough moment. 

Back in the clone world, Compaq were trying to tempt users to the joys of VGA graphics, but while you may think that £400 for just the card to get 640x480 at 256 colours was a bit steep, that was a snip considering the accompanying colour monitor was £505. A mono-VGA tube was only £205, but surely you'd never pay that much for a graphics card and not experience glorious technicolour? There again, that £400 in late 1987 is now just over half of the imaginary MSRP of the Nvidia RTX 5090 today! 

Tandy were refreshing their range of machines, and although tempting business options, £595 for a basic 256Kb of RAM was a tad pricey. 640Kb would take the price to £795 with a mono monitor, and £995 for CGA. At this point, the 286 models seemed like a better bet at £895, and with greater expansion options too. Sadly, it was a tad early for the 386 to be anything other than a multi-user (see below) wonder, with the Tandy 4000 expected to start at £1,995 for a system with just a floppy and no monitor. A useable spec with a hard drive and mono screen began at £2,995, and EGA graphics added another £500. 

AST talked of shipping a 20MHz 386, although prices were still to be confirmed. What you would do with a 386 as a single user was a more pertinent question, and providing justification of not spending the money. Meanwhile, Digital Research were upping their efforts to disappear slowly into history by releasing Concurrent DOS 386 2.0. Notable bragging rights were for up to 255 simultaneous tasks on a 386 machine with up to 4 (count 'em) gigabytes of memory, with each terminal user (for what else would you have this OS and such power for in 1988) able to run two MS-DOS programs at the same time. Not bad, but if you could afford that much memory in 1988, the cost of the attached 386 would have been just a mere rounding error. 

VGA graphics got a proper mention with the release of more upgrade boards, although the cheapest still rocked in at £299 and you'd still need the relevant display on top. 

The cover feature next, and by grouping the winners into ten categories, the What Micro? team have tried to cram in as many machines and formats as possible. 

Amstrad won Best Budget IBM Compatible, which is no surprise although comment was made about how the higher end PC1640 with EGA style display option was worse value for money than its compatriots, coming in rather close to some 286 base systems. The 1640 was still better value than the 1512, and it's hard to disagree with that opinion in hindsight. 

Fastest IBM Compatible went to the Compaq Deskpro 386/20, and when something starts at £5,225 ex VAT, it needed to fly off the proverbial shovel. IBM came close, as did the Mission 386.2 (nope, no idea either), but given the scarcity of 386 20MHz offerings out at the time, this was an easy win. 

Most Innovative Micro next and, well, yes, yes it was, and I'm not hiding my favouritism at all here. The Acorn Archimedes beat the Amiga and IBM's PS/2 range for innovation. For its price, it was fast, highly specified, and only lacked software to make it truly fly. If only it had been that simple. 

Cheapest Complete System feels like a section created for one reason and one reason only - the Amstrad PCW must be given its time in the spotlight. And you know what, for the late 1980's, if you wanted a home office system including a printer, there was no better value, and even the runners up section notes that the only real competitor to the £299 PCW would be a PC1512 and printer for about £600. Better, yes, but also double the price of the base PCW, and for that, Amstrad's CP/M wonder deserved its success. 

Back to the PC world with the next two - Best Value AT Compatible and Best Value 386-based Micro. The former was a clear winner given it's from one of the "big" manufacturers, although a tad slow at 8MHz when the competition were turning the dial up to 10 and even 12MHz (Ludicrous speed indeed!). The latter was a timely win for Apricot, being both British (when such malarkey still mattered), and being a relatively long time solid company. Whilst not as fast as say IBM's offerings (which were £2k more expensive, albeit with better expansion options), the Xen-I 386 was seen as a safer bet than the small company offering the cheapest 386 at that time, the Stanhope Baby 386, yours for £2,290. 

Laptops now (and Portables to come), with Zenith taking the honours for a 12 lb wonder that delivered a backlit LCD screen, something of a winner for any user. Toshiba, who would become synonymous with laptops as the 80's turned to the 90's, arrived as a runner up with their 1400LT - nearly half the price of the Zenith and suffering from only a squashed screen. Their more expensive models were considerations if you wanted more power (see below), and the Cambridge Z88 walked off with a nod to extreme portability. 

Ah yes, power. For the true "portable" warrior, the Compaq Portable III and Portable 386 took the larger of the mobile categories. They were expensive (£3.5k plus), heavy (20lbs), and mains only, but if you needed the grunt, these were the ones for you. There were many other options for the form factor, some even rocking under a grand, but Toshiba's T3100 and T5100 (also considered as laptops), were good alternatives as long as you had access to a mains point. 

The final two winners are the polar opposites of the era, Apple and IBM. Apple grabbed the Easiest to Use Micro award, which wasn't difficult to be fair, and with those new, "cheaper" prices... That, and it would take another year and a bit before the beauty that was RISC OS 2 descended from the heights for Archimedes owners... IBM had to settle for the Best Quality AT Compatible, which again wasn't difficult for the time. Yeah, the PS/2 Model 50 was expensive (£3,048 ex VAT), but you got some serious class for that outlay, with only Hewlett Packard and Compaq making up the rest of the running. 

A varied mix, to be sure, the same of which could be said for the AT trio from Dell, Ness and Qubie. Starting at £1,085 with the Ness, the Qubie and Dell offerings clocked in at £1,330 and £1,364 ex respectively, and while none of the machines had any major failings, the key differentiator was the service package - Dell's was highly professional, whereas Ness provided the bare essentials. Whether the extra £300 was worth it for the Dell was the key question. That being said, adding EGA colour to the trio varied wildly in price - Qubie for £325, Dell for £400, and a relatively extortionate £460 from Ness. 

Tandy's latest laptop came under the microscope, a 7.16MHz V20-powered device with 768Kb of memory and two (count 'em!) 720Kb 3.5" floppy drives. At £995 ex, it was a good value proposition compared to its rivals, yes, even the Amstrad PPC. Praise was given for the backlit LCD screen, and although there was a comment about the sheer value of Amstrad's offering (£499 for a similar spec), many would be better off spending more for the Tosh. To be fair, even now, I find the aesthetic really pleasing, although the idea of having a four hour battery life that required fifteen(!) hours to recharge from flat is a very 80's tech memory. 

As this was the fifth anniversary issue, the next feature is an obvious inclusion - a review of major events of the first five years of the magazine's life. It's a good potted history and packed with nice little bon mots of data, such as Amstrad's claim that as of the writing of the article, they had sold 750,000 PCW's. 

The In Brief section hosts a Lotus 1-2-3 competitor priced at under a tenner for the shareware version, and £30 for the full package including a manual, Graph in a Box (a pop up program that could create business graphics from a selection of data sources) was a £95 extra whose usefulness would be devalued as integrated packages came to the fore in the coming years, and Personnel Pal - not an A.I. People Services bot, thankfully, but more of a tech aid for personnel departments in their recruitment goals. No, not sure myself. 

The big software review is for Microsoft Excel, a £395 titan of number crunching. Adhering to the Windows 2 aesthetic, it was a worthy alternative to Lotus 1-2-3, but only for those who could afford the price tag and rocked a hard drive-equipped AT with EGA graphics. Spoiler alert, but as the SBC ad below shows, that set up would be nearly two grand ex VAT, thank you very much, with both Windows and Excel as extras. Onmis Quartz (a database manager/language) and Q&A Write (a would be DOS-based Word competitor) round off the software reviews. 

Hardware wise, NEC's budget (£395 was budget back then) 24-pin printer offered great value for money for the time, whereas the Cameron Handy Scanner was, for £299, limited in its black and white scanning abilities, but seemed good value compared to more feature-rich options if your needs were modest. The usual hardware guides and the like round off the editorial content, so now to the ads. 

Commodore have the first eye-catching offer as they try to convince people to spend £499 (VAT inclusive) on their new Amiga 500. Even before the price cuts and bundles that would see the Amiga rule the 16-bit home computer world, albeit briefly before consoles and DOS/Windows machines took over, this was astoundingly good value, and as such, was a great home computer choice if you had the money. For business or home office use, there were (as you have seen above), more efficiently aligned (Lord, I've been hanging around managers too much!) options offering a more holistic approach to your computing requirements (Shoot me now!). 

SBC (as previously mentioned), grab two pages for their DOS compatibles, and with fairly decent prices too. Kudos also for the ad that, although it looks rather "busy", manages to convey all the relevant information and the dealer network. The mention of Derwentside ITEC brings back memories too, as they were the school's first choice of work experience placement for several of us back in the day. 

Amstrad have a go at trying to shift their DMP range of printers to business users, and yes, they were cheap, and no, they were not great, not even with that impressive 15" carriage (calm down at the back!).

Meanwhile, OKI (via Technitron Data) were trying their same, and to be fair to them, they had a much greater range (and prices), and were often a reasonable choice. 

Our old favourite, Silica, pop up with an ST ad, and for £299, it was a great buy to those wanting to leave the 8-bit era behind, and at 60% of the cost of an Amiga. 

Here's Elonex with their PC range, and although not the cheapest, by no way the most expensive, and they would become a regular name in group tests and awards round ups throughout the 90's, at least until they gave up on computers and went down the novelty tech route. 

Hi-Voltage's spread has the usual Amstrad, Opus and SBC shenanigans. alongside the NEW Amiga A500 from £399 (ex, so don't get too excited, although still a discount), and the A2000. They even had the Acorn Archimedes on demonstration. Great news, and all that, but wait until prospective buyers saw the price tag... 

Speaking of Cambridge's finest Anglo-Italian team, Acorn have an advert, placed lovingly(!) on the back cover, extolling the virtues of the A300 series. Ignore all of the asterisks, they're just copyright nods, and take note of not only the pricing (£795 ex for the half-meg 305 with mono monitor, £1,035 ex for the one-meg A310 with a colour display - i.e. the one you should have gone for!), but also of the 0% finance offer. Not a bad idea, considering the price, but for a maximum period of 12 months, you still had to have some serious incomings to afford nearly £1200 at £100 per month. Dealer prices were a smidge cheaper, but consider the 2025 equivalent (courtesy of the Bank of England inflation calculator) - a total of £3,400 equalling £283.54 per month just for a computer. That might even make some Apple fans wince these days! Back then, however, that didn't even cover the cost of a basic Mac Plus!

That, gentle reader, was January 1988 for What Micro?, and I feel the need to once again move away from the DOS-centric world for the next MoYY. The question is, what publication, and when from... Have you ever considered the aesthetic qualities of a kipper tie?

A Tale of Two Adverts - The advent of the PC in 1992

Following on from my last post, at what point did it appear likely, nay, apparent, that the PC would surpass the Amiga and ST in the UK to become the home computer of choice (if you could afford one)? 

I'll use these two adverts from Dan Technology Plc from the March and September 1992 issues of What Micro? to put forward my thoughts. There are plenty of other advertisers that could have been used, and while Dan were never the cheapest, nor were they the priciest either. A note on the prices, by the way: where accompanied by a figure in brackets, the first amount is excluding VAT, the second is inclusive at the going rate. Where a figure is quoted without a corresponding bracketed figure, that is VAT inclusive. 

Dan Technology ad - What Micro? March 1992

Dan Technology ad - What Micro? September 1992

The first advert is typical of its contemporaries: lots of numbers and quite a few hidden items (£50 extra for DOS and £57 for Windows added to those headline prices, for example), but I want you to check out the "bundle" price for that 12MHz 286 and the 386 above it, a cheeky little 25MHz SX number. 

That 286, packing 1Mb of RAM and a 40Mb hard drive with a 14" VGA display and MS-DOS 5.0 comes in at £588 ex VAT (so £690-ish for the average punter). The 1Mb 386 with a 125Mb hard drive and a SVGA display rocks in at £947 ex (£1,112). That also comes with DOS but Windows would bump the total to £1.004 (£1,183).

Now we fast forward six months, and that 286 is still... £588 ex. Not that surprising, monitors and hard drives hadn't dropped that much in price. The 386 though, that is something else. Although the hard drive is down to 100Mb, you get 2Mb of RAM, DOS and Windows for £774 (£910). And that, gentle reader, is an example (and 200 of Her Majesty's golden beer tokens) as to why the PC was becoming more popular in 1992. They were getting cheaper and becoming better value. 

As for the then-current machine of choice, the Commodore Amiga, it seemed almost untouchable. It was long established, had plenty of support, and pretty much offered what it had (barring a half meg memory upgrade) since 1987, except now for a cheaper price and some bundled software. The ST was a decent second place, but had lost momentum against good ol'chicken lips, and Atari's focus was switching to the potentially more lucrative console market. 

In that combination lay the problem. Your basic Amiga in 1987 was the Amiga 500, and Atari had the STFM. Fast forward five years and your STE still ran the same 68000 albeit with a blitter for display shenanigans, and the A500 was phasing out for the A600 (to many, a retrograde step), but neither Commodore nor Atari had done much to advance the tech in their low-end systems. The likely 1987 DOS machine you'd have bought would have been an Amstrad PC1512 mono display with a single floppy, and you'd maybe have change from £500. Yet if you wanted a hard drive for your PC, the mono model was priced by dealers at around £869 (£1,000) for a 20Mb offering, and CGA colour lofted that to £1.029 (£1,184).

Computer Express (for ST and Amstrad prices) - ad - Practical Computing July 1987

You could, of course add a hard drive for an ST, which would have been seen as an expensive luxury unless you had a specific reason for it, but as you can see from the dealer price, that would have put your single floppy STFM bundle up to £784 (£901). The Amiga had not yet graduated to hard drive storage yet, and to be fair, it didn't matter at this stage in our story. Yet my point, such as it is, remains: for a general home computer in 1987, the Amiga and ST were better value and more capable than the DOS PC. In 1992, much less so. 

News section - What Micro? March 1992

In the PC world, scale of economy (particularly in the US, where neither Commodore nor Atari really cracked it with their 16-bit offerings) and competition (unlike having a single company supplying you with hardware) played a part in forcing prices lower, nowhere more obvious than in the CPU arena. The history is a little complicated (and rather lawsuit heavy), but basically by 1992, Intel was competing with AMD in supplying 386 chips to PC manufacturers. AMD had been selling a 25MHz version since early 1991 and Intel only responded in early '92. As you can see from the bar charts, the expectation was that the 486 would soon hit the mainstream, and since Intel would have a brief monopoly on that generation too, it made sense for them to push faster and more lucrative chips on to the market. It also helped that the 386 was a genuine technological improvement over the 286, thus aiding its popularity, especially with the release of Windows 3, and the 486 was faster again (very simplistically speaking). 

March 1992 - remember to add £57 onto that price for Windows.

September for the whole kit and caboodle.

As an aside, check out the difference in 486 systems between March and September 1992. That 486SX 20MHz with 4Mb of RAM and a 125Mb hard drive with Windows for £1,381 (£1,622), compared to 25MHz chip but with practically the same spec otherwise for £923 (£1,085). Let me be clear, that was still a ton of money back then - the BoE inflation calculator puts those inc VAT amounts at £3,500 and £2,350 respectively, but prices were dropping and dropping in a serious way. Indeed, whereas the 8086/8088 seemed to stick around forever since the days of the original IBM XT (and Amstrad were still trying to hawk such machines even in early '92, some nine(!) years after the grandaddy of all DOS PC's landed in Blighty), the 286's position as the de facto entry-level CPU was relatively brief, and as noted above, Intel's defensive measures against competitors made the 386's time in the sun seem similarly fleeting. 

First Computer Centre ad - Amiga Format Feb 1993

Let's go back the then-extant 16-bit home computers. Whilst 1992 would see spec increases announced for both formats, only Commodore managed to get any serious numbers into the hands of consumers, and even then, the new machines were more expensive than their predecessors. The A500 had dropped to around £299 before being discontinued, and its replacement, the A600, debuted at £399, or £449 with a hard drive. The A1200 retook the £399 price point, but getting an HD-equipped version took the price to over £600 for 40Mb of storage. The AGA display capabilities were a step up, but still lagging behind the PC. 256 colours were great and all that, but even a barely above basic spec PC equipped with 512kb of VRAM enabled the Super VGA resolution (800x600) at 256 colours. Not many games utilised this yet, but for productivity work, having that in Windows (albeit rather slowly for many users), was something the Miggy could never match out of the box. If you did want to include a dedicated display for your A1200, adding a Philips CM8833 Mk2 monitor took the A1200 HD put another £225 on the bill, so for a total of £825 or thereabouts, you had your Amiga set up. (The prices from the ad above are slightly later than the two PC magazines used for this article, but this adds confirmation to my point - PC prices did not suddenly go up over the 1992 festive period, thus making the value comparison even more valid). 

Silica Systems ad - ST Format December 1992

As for Atari, the Falcon, although a cracking machine, began at £499 minus a hard drive, and to properly spec it out with extra memory and some storage would, at least in its early days, set you back £899 (4Mb/65Mb), yet still no monitor. Now look back at the 386 from the September issue. £910. 

Of course, the Amiga and ST were facing other competition as well. Sega and Nintendo had delivered 16-bit console gaming to the UK masses (the 8-bitters were around in the late 1980's, just nowhere near as popular as the corresponding 8-bit computers, which to their credit were still selling software units in decent numbers well into 1992), and by the time Christmas of that year arrived, you could get a Mega Drive or a SNES for under £130 a piece. 

Special Reserve ad - Mean Machines Sega December 1992

Special Reserve ad - Computer and Video Games November 1992

The PC had reached a point where, spec for spec (excluding a sound card for gamers), it was better value than the comparable Amiga or ST spec, and the overall proposition of the PC had improved immensely. And since the PC had been a much stronger platform in the US for home users, there were many more titles from that market designed for the PC that the Amiga and ST just couldn't handle (looking at you, Wolfenstein 3D, never mind Doom the following year). Or, if they could, the ports were heavily constrained. The PC could now display more colours (until AGA), had a greater capacity floppy drive format, but also came with a hard drive as standard. I can't be the only former Amiga owner who begrudged swapping up to 10 disks in some adventure games. There again, even if you could afford a hard drive for your Miggy (and I certainly couldn't), you had to rely on the developers permitting hard drive installation, and that wasn't a given either. Justifiably, by 1992, a hard drive was becoming an essential purchase for any home machine, rather than just a nice quality of life improvement option.

One must not forget the effect of Windows 3.0 either. It worked, mostly (you had to be there!), and gave PC owners the option of a graphical user interface for the serious stuff, with DOS underpinning it for games. Personally, I think Win 3.0 looks terrible, and ran like a sloth on anything other than a very speedy 386 with at least 4Mb of RAM, but there again I also think the aesthetic of RISC OS trumps any other OS of the time (and kinda still does, but what do I know?), but compared to what the ST or Amiga desktops looked like, Windows in 800x600 could arguably be described as the more seemly way to operate a computer. There again, pretty is as pretty does... but that didn't matter as Microsoft were well on their way to cementing their DOS dominance with control of the PC GUI-based OS market too. 

I.S.C ad - Personal Computer World November 1987 - last item in Specials. 

On the whole, both the ST and Amiga had been left too long at their 1987 specs. It made them cheaper than a corresponding PC, but they lacked standardised hard drove support and, both a blessing and curse, the lack of requirement for a dedicated monitor. Both of these requirements were expensive add-ons in the 1980's. For example, in 1987, adding just an EGA card and monitor to an existing PC was more than the ST cost! But as '92 rolled in though, EGA had gone the way of the dodo, 256kb VGA was your very basic display adaptor, and hard drives didn't cost a small internal organ. Meanwhile, good luck word processing on your Amiga and that 14" Alba TV...

I know, I know, the Amiga and ST in the UK were predominantly games machines for that generation, but considering the low-cost home computer market was being squeezed from one side by dedicated games consoles that could, in some cases, perform wonders the computers couldn't, and by the PC from the other which could do more technologically advanced gaming than consoles and perform the traditional role of a home computer much more ably than the 16-bitters, there was little room for manoeuvre by either Commodore or Atari. 

This isn't a dig at any particular format, merely just highlighting that whilst Commodore and, to a lesser degree, Atari made bank on their most successful products, they failed to develop them any further than strictly necessary, seemingly too focussed on each other. In the background, the DOS PC evolved, improved and, most importantly, became relatively cheaper at an increasingly blistering pace. It was here, in 1992, that if you included a hard drive and monitor across all three options, a PC could go toe to toe value-wise against the established home machines. 

Then we get to the fact that neither Commodore nor Atari had the resources to fight this battle much longer. Atari pivoted (back) to consoles first but it was too knackered at this point to fight off either Sega or Nintendo, never mind the new 3DO and Commodore's own CD32. Not that Commodore's console was a saviour either. A decent machine, no doubt, but the established players in the 16-bit world had mass and inertia on their side. Newer entrants, such as Atari and 3DO, were banking on their "next-gen" offerings, and sure, for a time, they looked tempting. However, by 1994, Sony's PlayStation became a known quantity and, well, we know how that ended... And no, at the risk of repeating myself, I do not think Commodore UK would have had a snowball's chance if they'd acquired the remnants of Commodore International in 1994. Just keeping the existing A1200/A4000/CD32 machines going would have taken a lot of their funding, and developing custom hardware would have been a huge gamble at the very least. Consider this point: the AGA chipset was already two years old (from a consumer point of view) when Commodore Int went bust. Say another year to get a new chipset out of the door (at an unknown cost to the end user), all the while maintaining the platform on increasingly dated 680x0 processors. The nascent PowerPC chips would have been the perfect "next-gen" option, but that would have been very pricey. Meanwhile, the Windows PC moves through the 486 generation towards the Pentium, adding Windows accelerator cards to ensure users could experience a smooth, high resolution desktop, Apple begin their move to the aforementioned PowerPC, and the console war becomes blindingly simple as Sony takes the market by storm, even, eventually, in Japan, where the Saturn put up a good fight. There was no room for a player like "successor to Commodore" outside of a slowly decreasing number of adherents. Consumers had moved on, and that's before we get to the PC's mass-market moment, Windows 95. Say what you like, but Microsoft made sure everybody knew it had arrived, and there was nothing to stop that bandwagon. 

The tipping point for the PC over other home computer formats in the UK can be defined by many things: graphics, sound, processing capabilities, yet here I've hopefully given some justification that 1992 was the year everything aligned for DOS/Windows powered desktops. It would take time, but I consider that year to be the fulcrumt at which the general consumer could peek into an issue of What Micro? or Computer Shopper (amongst many other computing magazines the UK had back then), and decide that the PC had more to offer, for both immediate needs as well as those in the future, and once on that path, there was little reason to go back. No matter what Commodore, Atari (or Acorn) released, it could never have been "better enough" (a contentious term if ever there was one) to move the needle in the UK, never mind the other mass markets, and certainly not in the US. What these two adverts demonstrate is that the PC's price/value ratio was improving beyond the ability of other formats to compete, a gap that would only widen as time passed. It would be a long while before a bare bones useable PC would reach the price point of what the Amiga and ST had retailed at, but by then, it didn't matter. The split between a home console and a reasonably priced home computer had been set and would remain so for years to come. 

Magazines of Yesteryear - What Micro? - October 1989

As Autumn arrived in 1989, Black Box's "Ride on Time" had knocked Jive Bunny and the Mixmasters off the top of the singles chart (for my sins, I received the Jive Bunny album that Christmas), Bodger and Badger, The Poddington Peas, and Challenge Anneka hit the small screen, whilst Batman, Dead Poets Society, and Lethal Weapon 2 were entertaining cinema goers. Meanwhile, What Micro? was casting a gimlet eye on the top twelve PC's you could buy, alongside integrated packages, Word 5, Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2.2, and the Macintosh portable. What a time to be alive!

Looking a tad rough with age, I know exactly how this mag feels.

In the news, Digital Matrix were adding 25 and 30MHz versions to their 386 range, with the base Hercules display equipped model with 1Mb of RAM and 20Mb of hard drive storage for £1,715. A top-specced mono model (2/300 plus 60Mb tape streamer) was yours for £3,760, and a three user system (for what else did one need a 386 for in 1989?), with 4/65, a 40Mb streamer plus two (count 'em) Wyse 120 terminals primed bank manager angst at £4,995! You got SCO Office Portfolio and SCO Xenix 386 included, but that was just for the 25MHz version. An extra 5Mhz would cost £2,310, £4,609 and £5,740 respectively. 

Meanwhile, Tandy had a sub-£1k '086 portable sans hard drive for £999 (spinning rust was £700 extra), and Toshiba were bundling a printer worth £345 with their mains-only AT portable, the T1600 for £3,195. What a bargain! If you wanted something capable of use on the move (ish), Packard Bell's PB286LE with 1/20 started at £2,195, combining a 15lb all up weight (complain about an extra 100 grams on you next ultra-portable, why don't you!) and a three hour battery life. I've had Teams meetings last longer than that!

There was also a competition to win a Commodore PC20, complete with MS-DOS, a 20Mb hard disk and a monitor. The same spec machine did rather well in...

... the cover group test for the Top 12 PC's, and the mag defined PC rather tightly - they were talking about the original XT spec and not the later AT (286 and above with high density floppy drives etc) one, and this meant that the dozen desktops on display here were what would be classed as "affordable", as far as 1989 DOS machines went. This truly was the great and the good of the era, and also highlights that for UK home users at this particular point in time, the ST, Amiga and Archimedes were far better all-round machines than any DOS-powered wonder. Amstrad makes up a quarter of the review samples, with their PC1512, PC1640 and the latest 2086, and the reviewer notes the first two machines are definitely long in the tooth but also still capable "budget" computers - the base PC1512 rocks up a mono display and a single floppy for £399. Advent, Commodore, Epson, Elonex, IBM, Opus, NESS, Samsung and Tulip round out the rest to varying degrees of success, The verdict box makes it's very much a buyers choice, but spending anything over a grand here was considered wasteful. There again, the question of whether or not an AT-spec machine would see you right also raises an interesting comment - people who need a mainstream machine for the next five years should consider a 386. What was the saying about never going into the prophecy business? Over the next three years, the £1,000 level barrier would shatter through three processor generations (286, 386 and 486) with surprising ease.

The Mac Portable is next and, it is a doozy of a machine - having seen a real one at the North West Computer Museum, it's a desirable piece of kit even now, though my back wouldn't like me for carrying one. Its size is noted, as is the cost (£4,500 with a hard drive, £4,000 floppy only). Using a different kind of battery tech (lead acid, hence the weight), the off-grid longevity was claimed to be five to eight hours, twelve for the floppy-only model! The 16MHz 68000 made it a speedy Mac, and even though there were similarly pricey DOS options (the 12MHz Zenith Turbosport 386 and Toshiba's T5200 reach and break the £5k barrier), users wanting any kind of portable computer could find cheaper. Just not a Mac. 

There's a feature on word processors, how they could help people who wanted to type long documents, what defined the concept of a word processor, and why a PC loaded up with a then-modern day piece of software would be much more useful than any dedicated kit (looking at you, Amstrad PCW). There's hints and tips about formatting, font choices and how to make the most of any word processing software, and for the time, this was very informative stuff. 

There were other software options to the dedicated word processor, and this is where the "integrated package" comes in. A round up of six contenders vie for the title of best all-in-one business bundle, offering word processing, databases, spreadsheets (those last two are NOT the same thing!), and maybe some comms capabilities. Prices aren't bad - £36 for the questionably named "The Secretary Bird", to £199 for Ability Plus. Good old 90's bundled favourite Microoft Works tips in at £145. There is no overall winner, just shades of grey recommendations, which is as it should be as each package has its own strengths and weaknesses. Any would see you right for most needs. Just try not to panic at having to spend actual money on what these days are considered "free" applications. 

Cost is something to consider when looking at Microsoft Word v5.0, and neatly demonstrates how massively times have changed. £395 would get you the over-sized box complete with a 640-page user's guide, 250-page reference manual, 300-pages on using Word with printers(!), a 30-page pocket guide, a 110-page "ideas" guide, a 10-page newsletter and two advertising leaflets. There's even a six-page road map on how to use the manuals! After buying a new bookcase for this assortment of knowledge, you then have to deal with 13 floppies, and although you can get away with using Word 5 on a dual-floppy machine, it's best to install the bugger, where it harvests 2Mb of space. The overall verdict is that Word 5 is state of the art, but possibly overkill for most. Can't argue with that point of view. 

Speaking of cutting edge, Lotus 1-2-3 falls into the version trap with a strangely numbered Release 2.2, coming as it does after Release 3.0. The latter was the all-singing, all-dancing 3D packed 286/386 bothering deity-level app, requiring 4Mb of hard drive space. 2.2, however, was for mere mortals, but still cost £395 (seems a popular price - just less than a billy basic Amstrad PC1512). Upgrades were much cheaper (as little as £35 for some), but the advice is that if you wanted something like Lotus 1-2-3 then Release 3.0 was a much better option and, as such, required you to jump on board the AT bandwagon. Few with XT-class machines would find Release 2.2 good value for money. 

Of course, being 1989, whatever serious work you do would need to be shared, and this would primarily involve a printer. Handily, a guide to such decibel deliverers is here for options under £500. The budget level is catered for by 9-pin dot matrix wonders, with listed prices starting at £125. The more capable (I did not say better!) 24-pinners begin at £249. For those of you with only contempt for your hearing, Daisywheel printers offer typewriter levels of quality as well as enough volume to wake the dead. Finally, there are a handful of inkjet and thermal types that will deliver peace and quiet, but not necessarily good quality text or value for money. Not yet, anyway... The recommended models include the Panasonic KX-P1124, the Amstrad LQ5000di (albeit with relatively poor print and very poor build qualities), as well as the ever-present Star LC10, truly the budget connoisseur's 9-pin option. 

Finally, there is the Buyer's Guide. After a PC clone, AT-compatibles or portables, this here is your list, and there is a lot to ponder. Many manufacturers, specs and budgets, but as it's 1989, your trip to Dixons would probably net you an Amstrad... Serious software gets a look in too. 

The really fun part now: the adverts, and this absolute corker from IBM targets the business user with a rather confident statement about buying one of their latest 486 machines. Well, almost. If you purchased a PS/2 Model 70-A21 386 desktop, you'd be able to swap out the processors when the new fangled three times more powerful Intel chips landed. Cool idea, but considering this ad from Compumart has the expandable 70-A21 at £4,103 excluding VAT, that's some serious moolah to drop on the promise of spending even more money on faster things to come - never mind the reliance on Micro Channel Architecture, nor the fact that a monitor and DOS appears to be extra! Put another way, with VAT, that was £4,718 from a reseller. That amount today equates to a smidge over £12k! You might not get fired for buying IBM, but you could go bankrupt!

NESS is next, and they can start you on an 8088 XT (also covered in the group test) for £695. Although the ad makes zero reference about display options, that's for the mono model. CGA came in at £870, EGA at £990 and the (then) holy grail of VGA at £1,130. You can guess that the 286's would have suitable additions to their prices for colour, and that 386 would be pricey indeed (though far less than an IBM option). 

Here's a name that's definitely still with us: Dell. Their base 286 (none of that XT rabble for these legends) starts at £1049 for a mono system. The top of the line System 325 386 is as eye watering as IBM's offering: £5,399 ex VAT for 4Mb of RAM and a 150Mb hard drive. Seriously powerful for the time, but also seriously expensive. The more basic System 325 with 1/90 and mono VGA was still £3,949 ex. One year later, that would be £2,099. A year after that, half again. That's not to say these were over-priced. They were not. I merely point out the changes to evidence the sheer speed of change the PC market underwent between 1989 and 1994. 

Megaland, self-proclaimed "specialists in mail order" seemed to have everything and, in a nice touch for personal buyers, published VAT-inclusive prices as well. Both PC's (Samsung, Commodore and Amstrad) and Amigas (B2000 and A500) get a look in, as does the PCW and Commodore C64. It's a useful advert as it offers Amiga A500-based business packs (computer, monitor and printer) for £745 inc, or £853 inc with a half meg RAM upgrade. More expensive than an Amstrad PCW, but so much more capable. The problem the Amiga would have in the next couple of years is that the cost of a hard drive equipped 286 with VGA colour would drop from the £2,146 listed Commodore PC40-III (1/40) to well under a grand. As noted above, the 386 would be snapping at its heels too. Meanwhile, the Amiga and ST stagnated - and no, neither the 68020-powered A1200 nor the ever-so beautiful Falcon '030 could keep up with the advancements in the DOS, later Windows/DOS world. The PC woulds still cost more, but could also do a hell of a lot more - and piss poor management by both Commodore and Atari would doom those companies long before DOOM stamped itself on the PC for gamers.

Speaking of the those UK home computer favourites, we'll end with a pair of Silica ads: one each for the Amiga and the ST. Classics of their time (the computers and the adverts), the 16-bitters had never had it so good. From the viewpoint of October 1989, there was plenty of life left in them and the DOS PC was no competition at all. Ah, the innocence of youth...

Anyway, that's it for 1989. For the next Magazines of Yesteryear, I rather fancy something a little more... niche...