The Top 20 Home Computers Of All Time – The Guardian
The Top 20 Home Computers Of All Time – The Guardian
The UK newspaper The Guardian has published a list of the Top 20 Home Computers of all time. I have thoughts………
The main ChinnyVision channel is over here – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCifcRlP9KST8T0irCHyykrA
KEITH! KEITH! What’s our criteria?!
The *only* surprising thing about this Guardian list is that there isn’t an editors note at the bottom calling home computers racist, misogynist, symbols of white supremacy and patriarchy.
As the Dragon 32 and Acorn Electron makes the list, why no Amstrad PCW and Amstrad PCs? After all these lines sold 8 million and 12 million machines
I don’t like this aggressive self righteous version of Chinny
Stop attacking Keith!!!!
I like that the Spectrum listed is specifically the 48K but also on the list is MSX which was a computer standard not an actual computer.
35 years later and I still love a rant/ argument about 80s computers.
The mind boggles. Schizophrenic list.
PC was always going to be #1 games machine because more retail games were released on the PC in the 80’s than any platform bar C64. From the UK perspective thought you would not think that as it was just massively overpriced in the UK. Much more compared to Europe and especially the US.
Retail Games published 1985 to January 1990.
IBM/PC – 2154 Games
CPC – 1775
Amiga 1172 Games
“My mind hurts this guy’s nuts” – well that was an admission I wasn’t expecting 😄
Fantastic video- very entertaining. All lists are in the eye of the beholder ….but seriously…this list is utter utter bollocks. Anyone who has a vague clue would know how flawed it all is. Total hack job and farcical in every way. Well done for putting it to the sword Chinny!
The TRS80 text is about the model 1, with the picture of the 100 portable, a completely incompatible machine!
I know I’m not one to talk about not getting emotional on videos but can we go back to happy Chinny please?
I can sort of see why the IBM PC was in there but it shouldn’t of been no.1!
You are right about the Archimedes, that should of been in there as that was the start of the modern RISC revolution and from that came ARM (I know Acorn weren’t the first to come up with RISC processors but probably the most successful)
On the whole not a very good article, no context on which to base the choices and some very important machines left out.
Keith from the Grauniad probably thinks that Candy Crush is the pinnacle of video gaming…
(Can’t be bothered switching accounts to comment!)
My uncle had a PC in the late 80s, but he actually used it for proper "stuff" and not games. As he had a Sharp MZ700 before that (which I cheekily asked for after he upgraded to the PC) he’s not necessarily a good case study…
Undoubtedly in 1979 the Atari 800 was in terms of hardware and games light years ahead of anything else. IBMs first plan was a license built version. If Atari had not not lost the plot and imploded it would have been replaced in the mid 80s with an Atari Computer and console based on the Amiga chipset. Commodore would have had something along the lines of the ST
The generic beige box number 1, how more wrong could it be. Great rant by the way.
Ahh I remember me and all my friends going round to Dave’s house to play on his Altair 8800, that time the lights came on, man we collectively cacked our pants with excitement!
I did not know chinny had another channel.
Ewww the guardian online, virtual toilet paper right there!
I don’t know who wrote that list but I think they did it for release on April 1st. What a pile of festering shite!
I think you were too kind to this clown to be honest.
If the Dragon and the Electron are there, why not the Oric (successful in France), QL (a machine that kicked off Linux), Raspberry Pi (era isn’t a factor here and the Pi is more in the ethos of the "home" computer than the PC or Mac will ever be).
And if we are going to include business machines, why isn’t CP/M there?
Absolutely spot on with the Archimedes BTW.
Archimedes wasnt really a home computer though, it was too expensive. My top 10 would be:
10: Atari 8 bit
9: Pc clones (specifically the Amstrad cheapo ones)
8: Atari ST
7: BBC Micro
6: Vic 20
5: Zx81
4: Amstrad cpc
3: Spectrum
2: Amiga
1: C64
You nailed the problem: what’s the criteria? Who / where is this article aimed at? Lack of Archimedes being present is a shocker and shows a real lack of thought.
That list should get burned and never spoken about again.
Extremely odd list. I can only think he went with the 20 names he knew, stuck them in a tombola and put them out one at a time. Very strange to place the ST so low down. I do agree with the Dragon 32 being on the list, if we are looking purely at UK home computers, but others I don’t get at all.
Thanks for the vid (and the rant). How the hell this clown thinks the Altair 8800, a hobbyist computer only ever available by mail order, was a "home" computer is beyond me…
While watching your vid I remembered a documentary I watched a few years ago… it aired on BBC Channel 4 in 2013 (no I don’t live in the UK, I stumbled across it online one day) called "Charlie Brooker’s How Videogames Changed The World". This ranked the top 25 games of all time, of course we’ve all got our own games that we think are the best so no-one would ever agree with any list…there were however two problems I had with this documentary…
1. The games in the their top 25 list were done in chronological order of year released, meaning that classic older games had no chance of being highly ranked. For example, Pong is at number 25 because it’s the earliest game in their list, and games like Pacman are number 23, Manic Miner at number 22…. Super Mario Bros is only number 20? Tetris only number 19? How the hell do you put two of the most influential games in the world so far down in the list (I’m no SMB fan, but I still recognise its importance), and yet trash like Angry Birds gets in at number 4 only because it was released so many years later…
2. Twitter is number one. Just let that sink in for a moment….
HOW IN THE MOTHERLOVING HELL IS TWITTER A GAME?????
It was at that exact moment of seeing that come up at #1, having sat through most of this turd of a documentary already, that I turned it off. Seriously, what the ***k….
This doc has a wiki page, in which the full list of games is shown (ranking #25 to #1 in chronological order of release, as it was in the doc). The tw@ that wrote the article in your vid featured in the show too, and also wrote a column about it in The Guardian (of course he would), excerpts of which are in the wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Videogames_Changed_the_World
And some tw@ also wrote that "for gamers, the show would have been pretty much heaven".
Hell was more my thought on it…
At my school the boarders could bring in their computers. In my floor we had a Spectrum, CPC664, ST, and MSX. We all envied the boy with the ST, and pitied the boy with the MSX.
Well its definitely a list.
Nice to hear someone else shout out the exact same responses I had reading the list. Not sure I could make a credible list, wouldn’t know where to start, other than leave half these entries off.
Chinny Hill? How long has this been going? G’day mate