Quote:
Originally Posted by G6Tanuki
I never really fell into Sir Clive's nasty unreliable home-computers with their typing-on-cold-liver keyboards and under-heatsinked voltage-regulators that would shut down after you'd spent 45 minutes typing-in hexcodes from a magazine article.... though their heritage extended into the Amstrad PCW series of 'integrated' word-processors which brought desktop-publishing to the masses, and by way of terminal-emulation software let loads of students engage in 1990s bulletin-board chats with their friends.
[BT 'surftime' and university-halls-of-residence deploying otherwise-obsolete CAMTEC PADs helped here].;.
Though it has to be said that the LocoScript and the Amstrad PCW entirely killed-off the historic "thesis-typer-upper" second-income stream for people in University/College-towns.
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Hmm. I'm not sure they were 'nasty', and as for unreliable I can only say that although I never owned a Spectrum (I jumped straight from a ZX81 to a BBC-B), my younger brother had one and so did his schoolfriend. I don't recall either of them complaining of overheating or mysterious shut-downs. The keyboards were bad, certainly.
Our shop sold the Spectrum for a short period and we did get a fair number of returns, but almost all of them turned out to be working perfectly. Most failures seemed to be down to the inability of the customer to tune their TV into the Speccy's output signal!