Systems

Acorn announced the Archimedes in 1987: a family of home and school computers built around its own 32-bit ARM processor and three companion chips for memory, video and input/output. It ran BBC BASIC many times faster than a BBC Micro and could show 256 colours, but it cost far more than an Atari ST or Amiga and sold mostly to schools. The processor outlived the machine: Acorn spun off its ARM design team in 1990, and ARM chips went on to power phones and much else.

Acorn's 1980 Atom put a 6502, a full-sized keyboard and a BASIC with an integrated assembler into one case. Buyers could build the kit or choose an assembled machine, then add memory and other hardware. Its early software market brought Acornsoft and Bug-Byte to home-computer owners before the BBC Micro.

Acorn’s 1983 Electron brought BBC BASIC to a cheaper home computer. Its bitmap display modes and BASIC sound commands retained familiar programming ideas, while missing hardware made BBC Micro compatibility a question for each program.

The Amiga CD32 put a streamlined A1200-derived design into a 1993 CD games console. Its 68EC020, AGA chipset and 2MB of Chip RAM were joined by a double-speed CD-ROM drive and the Akiko control chip. CD storage changed distribution and audio possibilities without removing the Amiga’s memory and display constraints.

Alan Sugar's Amstrad, until then a maker of cheap hi-fi, launched the CPC464 in April 1984: a Z80 computer with a built-in cassette deck, sold with its own monitor for £229 in green or £329 in colour. Designed in eight months by outside contractors, it became a best-seller in Britain, France and Spain, and Amstrad claimed over two and a half million CPCs sold by 1990.

Steve Wozniak's Apple II went on sale in June 1977 at $1,298 with 4K. Its display circuit refreshed the memory for free, its colours came from where a dot sat against the television's colour signal, and its eight slots, Disk II drive and VisiCalc turned a hobbyist's machine into one Apple was still selling in 1993.

Atari's Video Computer System went on sale in 1977 and became the console that defined home video games in North America. It had no screen memory and 128 bytes of RAM, so every game had to build the picture line by line as the television drew it.

The 1982 Atari 5200 drew on Atari’s computer-chip family but used its own cartridge environment. Its analogue controller, keypad and model revisions matter as much as the relationship to the Atari 400 and 800.

The Atari 7800 paired a display-list graphics chip with retained TIA sound and a separate 2600 compatibility mode. Announced in 1984, it reached the retail market in 1986; the two dates describe different stages.

Atari's home computers, announced in 1979, gave a 6502 three custom chips: ANTIC, a display processor that runs its own program every frame, CTIA (later GTIA) for colour and player/missile graphics, and POKEY for sound, keyboard and serial input and output. The line ran through the XL and XE models until Atari dropped the last of it at the end of 1991.

The Falcon030 continued Atari’s desktop and MIDI computer line with a 68030, a Motorola 56001 DSP and new video and sound facilities. Configuration and expansion matter when comparing its software with the ST or later demo machines.

Atari’s Jaguar divided work between Tom, Jerry and an external 68000. Its object processor, GPU, blitter and DSP had different jobs; calling the console 64-bit does not describe every arithmetic operation or processor.

Designed at Epyx by R.J. Mical and Dave Needle, the Amiga's software and hardware designers, the Lynx went on sale under Atari's name in 1989. It had a backlit colour screen, a 65C02 processor and a custom chip that scaled sprites as it drew them. It cost twice as much as a Game Boy, ran through its six AA batteries in a few hours, and never caught up.

Jack Tramiel's Atari showed the 68000-based ST in January 1985 and sold the 520ST in Britain that summer for £749.99 with a monitor. It had a plain framebuffer, a Yamaha sound chip, the GEM desktop and, unusually, MIDI ports as standard, which made it a fixture of music studios. Atari's own figures put it at half a million British owners by 1991.

Acorn built the BBC Microcomputer for the BBC's Computer Literacy Project, which launched with The Computer Programme on BBC2 in January 1982. Announced at £235 and £335, it sold for £299 (Model A) and £399 (Model B), ran a 6502 at 2 MHz, and came with a BASIC that let programmers write named procedures and mix in 6502 assembly language. Elite was written for it.

Coleco launched the ColecoVision in the United States in August 1982 at about $175, with Nintendo's Donkey Kong in the box. A Z80, Texas Instruments' TMS9928A video chip and SN76489 sound chip gave it arcade conversions that made the Atari 2600 look old, and an adaptor let it play 2600 cartridges too. It sold over half a million consoles in its first five months. Coleco then bet on the Adam computer, which shipped late and unreliable, and both machines were gone by 1985.

The Commodore 128 combined a native BASIC 7 environment, C64 compatibility and CP/M. Its two processors and separate 80-column display hardware made the choice of mode central to using the machine.

Commodore replaced the VIC-20 in 1984 with the C16 and the Plus/4, built around one new chip, the TED, that handled video, sound, memory refresh and the keyboard. They could show 121 colours but had no sprites and could not run C64 software. They sold slowly at full price, then found buyers once they were cheap, with games from the budget labels at £1.99.

Announced in January 1982 at $595, the Commodore 64 paired a 6510 processor with the VIC-II and SID chips and 64K of RAM. Price cuts took it to around $200 within eighteen months, and Guinness World Records lists it as the best-selling desktop computer model, although estimates of how many were sold range from about 10.6 to 30 million.

Launched in 1985, the Amiga paired a Motorola 68000 with custom chips that drew the screen, moved memory, played four channels of sampled sound and ran the floppy drive, under a preemptive multitasking operating system. The cheaper A500 of 1987 made it a mainstay of British and European homes until Commodore collapsed in 1994.

Commodore’s 1991 CDTV combined an Amiga-derived computer, CD drive and infrared remote in an audio-equipment-style case. Disc capacity, working memory and optional computer peripherals were separate parts of its design.

Commodore’s 1977 PET put a 6502 computer, monochrome screen, keyboard and cassette recorder in one case. Its character graphics and Microsoft BASIC made it a machine to program immediately; the small keyboard and 40-column display imposed limits that later PET and CBM models changed.

Commodore’s SX-64 packaged a C64 computer, five-inch colour monitor and disk drive for transport. It needed mains power, and its revised ROM and missing cassette connection made some everyday operations differ from a desktop C64.

Commodore's first colour home computer went on sale in Japan in 1980 as the VIC-1001 and in America in 1981 at $299.95. It had 5K of memory, a 22-column screen and a video chip nobody else had wanted. Commodore and the press of the day called it the first computer to sell a million, and it passed two million before production stopped in 1984.

A home computer from Mettoy, the maker of Corgi toys, launched in Wales in August 1982 at £199.50. Built on the same Motorola 6809E, SAM and 6847 video chips as Tandy's Color Computer, it offered 32K when the Spectrum offered 16K. Its maker, Dragon Data, went into receivership in June 1984, and the Dragon carried on in Spain under Eurohard.

Dragon Data's 1983 upgrade of the Dragon 32: 64K of RAM, an RS-232 serial port and auto-repeating keys, launched first in the United States through Tano and then in Britain at about £225. It started up as a Dragon 32 and needed a bootstrap to reach its extra memory. Its real purpose was Microware's OS-9 operating system, which would not run on the 32.

Famiclones are unlicensed copies of Nintendo's Famicom, built mostly in Taiwan and China from reverse-engineered chips and sold wherever Nintendo's own console was missing or expensive. In Russia Steepler's Dendy led the console market, in Poland the Pegasus sold openly in audio-video shops, and Taiwan's Micro Genius machines reached South America, Europe and Asia. Most played Famicom cartridges on a 60-pin slot, many came with multi-game cartridges, and later versions shrank the whole console onto a single chip.

A Z80 home computer designed by Voja Antonić and published in January 1984 as a build-it-yourself project in Računari u vašoj kući, a special edition of the Belgrade magazine Galaksija. It had no video chip: the Z80 drew the 32×16 text screen in software. Readers bought parts from Yugoslav firms and an Austrian supplier, and by October 1984 nearly 6,000 were said to be in Yugoslav homes.

Nintendo's LCD handheld games, one game and a clock per unit, ran from Ball in April 1980 to Mario the Juggler in 1991. Built from calculator parts, they sold 43.4 million by Nintendo's count, and the multi-screen Donkey Kong gave Nintendo the cross-shaped pad it later put on the NES and Game Boy.

Nintendo's 32-bit handheld went on sale in Japan on 21 March 2001. An ARM7TDMI processor let studios write in C instead of the Game Boy's 8-bit assembly language, a second 8-bit processor kept the old Game Boy cartridges running, and its 240×160 screen could show SNES-style scaling and rotation. With the SP and the Micro it sold 81.51 million by Nintendo's count.

The NewBrain reached buyers in 1982 with 32K of RAM, a Z80A and, on the AD model, a built-in 16-character fluorescent display. It offered flexible text and graphics but no colour or sound. Its long route through Sinclair Radionics, Newbury Laboratories and Grundy made it a contemporary of machines designed much later.

Mattel test-marketed the Intellivision in 1979 and sold it across the United States from 1980 at $299 list. A General Instrument 16-bit processor, a display chip that drew characters and eight moving objects for it, and a three-channel sound generator gave it sports games that looked better than Atari's, and Mattel said so in advertisements with George Plimpton. A promised computer upgrade never properly arrived, Mattel Electronics lost heavily in the 1983 crash and closed in January 1984, and INTV Corporation kept selling the console until 1990.

Richard Altwasser and Steven Vickers, who had just built the ZX Spectrum's hardware and ROM, launched the Jupiter Ace in 1982 for £89.95. It put Forth in ROM where every other home computer put BASIC. Its maker, Jupiter Cantab, went under in 1983 after selling about five or six thousand, and the machine's users' club carried on without it.

Science of Cambridge's MK14 brought microprocessor programming within reach of a £39.95 kit buyer in 1978. Owners soldered the board, entered machine code through a hexadecimal keypad and watched the results on an LED display. Its manual even fitted a Moon Landing game into that small world.

MSX was a home computer standard, not a machine. Announced in Tokyo in June 1983 by ASCII and Microsoft with fourteen Japanese manufacturers, it gave every maker the same Z80, TMS9918 video chip, AY-3-8910 sound chip and Microsoft BASIC, so one cartridge ran on all of them. It took a large share of the Japanese market, found loyal followings in the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil and beyond, grew through MSX2, MSX2+ and turbo R, and was home to Konami's early Metal Gear games.

Sega's 1998 arcade board was a Dreamcast with twice the memory and games on ROM cartridges, at half the price of Sega's Model 3. Third parties adopted it, several boards could be linked for one game, and it ran arcade games for seven years before Sega replaced it.

SNK's Neo Geo of 1990 was an arcade system (MVS) and a home console (AES) running the same cartridges, which were among the largest and most expensive games ever sold. SNK's specification shows why its games looked like nothing else: the machine has no tiled background layer and draws almost everything, scenery included, out of tall sprite strips.

SNK launched the monochrome Neo Geo Pocket in Japan in October 1998, a week after Nintendo's Game Boy Color, and replaced it with the Neo Geo Pocket Color five months later. The colour model was praised for its screen, its 40-hour battery life and its micro-switched thumbstick, but SNK was sold to Aruze in January 2000 and withdrew the machine from the West that June.

Nintendo's 64-bit console reached Japan on 23 June 1996, America that September and Britain on 1 March 1997. Silicon Graphics designed its Reality Coprocessor, a chip that controls all of memory and runs whichever graphics microcode the game loads. Nintendo kept cartridges, fitted four controller ports, and counts 32.93 million sold.

Nintendo's 2004 handheld had two 3-inch screens, the lower one a touchscreen, plus a microphone, wireless play and a slot for Game Boy Advance cartridges. Its dual-screen idea baffled the industry when it was announced, and it went on to sell 154.02 million units by Nintendo's count.

Nintendo's 8-bit console launched in Japan as the Famicom in July 1983 and reached America as the NES in 1985-86. A 6502-based Ricoh CPU and a tile-and-sprite picture chip shaped its games; the front-loading NES added a lockout chip to control which cartridges could run. Nintendo counts 61.91 million sold.

Nintendo's Game Boy went on sale in Japan on 21 April 1989: a handheld from Gunpei Yokoi's R&D1 with a 160×144 monochrome LCD, four grey shades and a custom 8-bit processor. Packed with Tetris outside Japan, it outsold colour rivals from Atari and Sega, and Nintendo counts 118.69 million sales for the Game Boy line. Its programming manual tells developers to halt the processor whenever the game has nothing to do, to save the batteries.

NEC and Hudson Soft's console went on sale in Japan in October 1987, played games on HuCards the size of a credit card, and added the first CD-ROM drive for a games console in December 1988. It ran second to Nintendo in Japan and lost badly in America as the TurboGrafx-16. Hudson's chip manuals show how an 8-bit processor kept up: the CPU carries a memory mapper and the sound generator on the same die.

Sony's first games console grew out of a CD-ROM drive it was building for Nintendo's Super Famicom, a partnership Nintendo broke in public at the 1991 Chicago CES. Launched in Japan on 3 December 1994, it paired a cut-down R3000A with a fixed-point geometry coprocessor, sold more than 100 million units, and in 1997 let the public program it with the Net Yaroze kit.

Sony's second console went on sale in Japan on 4 March 2000 and was still being made in 2013. It paired the Emotion Engine processor with the Graphics Synthesizer, played DVD films, and ran PlayStation games on the original machine's own processor, which it kept on board as its I/O chip. Sony counts more than 160 million sold.

Sega's 1998 console put a modem in every box and was built round a Hitachi SH-4 and NEC and VideoLogic's PowerVR graphics. It broke American launch records in 1999, and in January 2001 Sega announced it would stop making it and leave the hardware business.

Sega's Game Gear, launched in Japan in October 1990, was a Master System rebuilt as a handheld with a backlit colour screen and a 4,096-colour palette. It sold between 8.5 and 10.6 million, by different counts, and its six AA batteries lasted a few hours against the Game Boy's day or more.

Sega's third home console went on sale in Japan as the Mark III in October 1985 and abroad as the Master System from 1986. It paired a Z80 with a Sega video chip that its own manual describes as an enhanced TMS9918A. It sold poorly against the NES in Japan and North America, but Mastertronic sold it in Britain at £99.95 from 1987, and in Europe and Brazil it outlasted the Mega Drive.

Sega's 16-bit console went on sale in Japan in 1988, reached America as the Genesis in 1989 and Britain in 1990. It paired a 68000 with a Z80 that ran the sound, with display limits that depend on the video mode and a processor clock that differs between PAL and NTSC. Its marketing was louder than its manual: 'Blast Processing' named no feature at all.

Sega's 32-bit CD console of 1994 sold out on its first day in Japan and was launched in America four months early as a surprise. Its two SH-2s, two video chips and 68EC000 sound CPU made it a strong 2D machine and a hard 3D one, and the PlayStation outsold it.

Launched on 12 January 1984 at £399, days before Apple's Macintosh, the Sinclair QL offered a Motorola 68008, 128K of RAM, two Microdrives, a multitasking operating system and four Psion business programs. It was announced before it worked. Sinclair took the money by mail order and shipped months late, with part of the system in an external ROM on the back, and the QL's reputation never recovered.

Sinclair's £125 Spectrum brought colour computing to British homes in 1982. Its attribute colours, curiously laid-out screen and one-bit beeper shaped a decade of games written by small teams and lone programmers.

Sinclair's first home computer went on sale in February 1980 at £99.95 built or £79.95 as a kit. It had 1K of memory, a 4K whole-number BASIC that took each keyword in a single keypress and refused bad lines, and a picture that disappeared whenever the Z80 had anything else to do.

Sinclair's four-chip computer sold for £49.95 as a kit in 1981. It had 1K of memory, a touch-sensitive keyboard and no video chip: the Z80 draws the picture by executing the screen, and FAST mode is the machine agreeing to stop.

The Super Famicom reached Japan on 21 November 1990, the SNES reached America in 1991, and Britain got it officially in April 1992 at £149.99, undercutting grey imports at £250 to £300. It paired a 65816-based processor with a graphics chip that could rotate and scale a background in Mode 7 and a Sony sound unit that played eight sampled voices, and Nintendo counts 49.10 million sold.

The 1981 TI-99/4A revised Texas Instruments’ earlier home computer with a full keyboard. Its BASIC graphics commands, cartridge software and separately purchased expansions shaped what an owner could do with the base machine.

Radio Shack announced the TRS-80 in August 1977 and sold it, fully built with screen and cassette recorder, for $599.95 through its own chain of shops. Tandy's technical handbook shows a machine built to a price in every detail, down to a character code that is only six bits stored, with the seventh worked out by a logic gate.

Radio Shack's 6809-based home computer, known to its owners as the CoCo. Tandy unveiled it in July 1980 at $399 with 4K of RAM, built from Motorola's own reference chips: the 6809E, the 6883 SAM and the 6847 video chip. The CoCo 2 of 1983 shrank it, and the CoCo 3 of 1986 added a custom chip with 640-pixel graphics, a 64-colour palette and up to 512K. Tandy stopped selling it in 1991.

GCE's 1982 console had a built-in 9-inch black-and-white screen and drew its pictures as lines, like an Asteroids cabinet, with coloured plastic overlays for each game. A Motorola 68A09 steered the beam through a single converter chip. Milton Bradley bought GCE, cut the price from $200 to $100, and stopped making it in 1984.

Microsoft's first console went on sale in North America on 15 November 2001 at $299. It was built from PC parts, a 733 MHz Intel processor and an Nvidia graphics chip, and it was the first console with a hard disk and an Ethernet port in every box. Xbox Live followed a year later. It sold well in America and poorly in Japan, and public sources put its total at 24 million.

A crowdfunded FPGA Spectrum in a case by Rick Dickinson and Phil Candy: a Z80N at up to 28MHz, 128 hardware sprites, Layer 2 graphics, a copper and three AY chips, still running the 1982 machine's software. Three Kickstarters, in 2017, 2020 and 2025, raised more than £5 million between them.