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Page 1 of 3 When it comes to the early days of the personal computer revolution what happened in the UK was very different from what happened in the States. So don't imagine that the well published stories of what happened around Silicon Valley, such as that in Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution tell you what happened here. Oh no, it was much more interesting than that!
In the States the personal computer could afford to be big and semi-professional if not quite fully professional. The equivalent of the early US personal computer was here in the UK more or less from the word go but we opted for a cheaper version in the form of the SWTP 6800. It looked like the more famous Altair - the world’s first personal computer - but it was very much built down to a price.
The SWTP - sort of looked like a computer
You may think that it was cheap enough at £275 but you are ignoring not only inflation but the number of other similarly priced units you needed before you had something that you could use. The minimum price for a usable system was much closer to £1000 and this put it out of the reach of the casual buyer. You had to know what you wanted a computer for to justify the cost. As a result most of these early “large” machines were bought by people with business uses in mind and most of them certainly weren’t “home” computers in any sense. Of course the people who bought them were enthusiasts and they did play with them but their playing had to be justified by some sort of pay off.
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