Ask HN: What was in your opinion the most underrated European computer pre 1990s

3 points by InterNautic 3 years ago | 5 comments

ggm 3 years ago |

The whitechapel. A graphics workstation with mouse before it was cool.

The early Olivetti designs were out of this world. Very stylish.

The ICL designs were cool, but an awful lot of things at ICL are really imports so the icl perq was really a 3 rivers bitslice machine afaik. But very very cool (I did animated icons on one using a bitmap editor called "cedra")

InterNautic 3 years ago | |

Oh, that Whitechapel stuff was what I am unfamiliar with. Any reading recommendations?

ggm 3 years ago | | |

Nah, I mean google, I just remember stunning design. I was mostly using other stuff. That it had a gorgeous on-off switch isn't really what you want to read. (It did. It was designed like a sports car) even then, most compsci people used these things to get terminal emulators up and write code. Decent scanners and digital cameras were frighteningly expensive so viewing images was surprisingly hard, because you couldn't get them online simply.

So these workstations had huge latent potential which mostly, geeks that we were, we couldn't use. At ucl-cs we worked with students from the Slade school of art who used the drawing programs we wrote to do art: that was nice (I coded a flood fill algorithm naively in sunview, in like 1984/5)

richardjam73 3 years ago |

Probably the Acorn Archimedes systems which seemed to always be disregarded in favour of the Amiga and Atari ST.

The Sinclair QL didn't do very well either but I don't know if it deserved it or not. ICL released a version called the One Per Desk with an integrated phone handset.

hunglee2 3 years ago |

Sinclair Spectrum ZX80 - sold 5 million units in the 1980's and legitimately brought home computer / home gaming to millions to people in the UK for first time.