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I started watching a lot of videos on retrocomputing recently. Well, the era they call retro I call “when I learned what I know now”. The 1980s was a fun time, as far as computers were concerned. There was variety, and computer companies were trying new things.

The more jarring thing I watched though was a review of the Timex Sinclair 2068, essentially the US version of the Sinclair Spectrum, which – as you'd imagine from the subject – was a very American view of why that computer failed. And the person reviewing the 2068 felt it failed because it represented poor value compared to... the Commodore VIC 20?

Which now I've spent some time thinking about it, I think I understand the logic. But it wasn't easy. You see, when I was growing up the school yard arguments were not about the ZX Spectrum vs the VIC 20, but it's vastly superior sibling, the Commodore 64. And both sides had a point, or so it seemed at the time.

The principle features of the ZX Spectrum were:

• A nice BASIC. That was considered kind of important then, even in a world where actually the primary purpose of the computer was gaming. Everyone understood that in order for people to get to the point they were writing games in the first place, the computer had to be nice to program.
• 48k of RAM, of which 41-42k was available to programmers.
• A fixed, single, graphics mode of 256x192, with each 8x8 pixel block allowed to use two colours picked from a palette of... I want to say 16 but I can't remember for sure.
• An awful keyboard. There was a revision called the Spectrum+ that had a slightly better keyboard based on the Sinclair QL's (but not really like the QL's, the QL's had a lighter feel to it.)
• A beeper type sound device, driven directly by the CPU
• Loading and saving from tape.
• A single crude expansion slot that was basically the Z80's pins on an edge connector.

The Commodore VIC 20 had 5k of RAM, 3.5k available. It had a single raw text mode, 22x24 IIRC, with each character position allowed to have two colours. It did allow characters to be user defined. BASIC was awful. Expansion was sort of better, it had a serial implementation of IEEE488 that was broken, a cartridge port, and a serial port. Like the Spectrum it was designed to load and save programs primarily from tape. Despite the extra ports, it just wasn't possible to do 90% of the things a Spectrum could do, so I'm baffled the reviewer saw fit to compare the two. They were only similar in terms of price. And the VIC 20 was way cheaper than the Spectrum in the UK.

The Commodore 64, on the other hand, was, on paper, superior:

• OK, BASIC wasn't. It was the same version as the VIC 20.
• 64k of RAM. Now we're getting somewhere.
• A mix of graphics and text modes, including a “better than ZX Spectrum” mode which used a similar attribute system for 8x8 blocks of pixels, but had a resolution of 320x200 and which supported sprites. And programmers could also drop the resolution to 160x200 and have four colours per 8x8 cell.
• A great keyboard
• A dedicated sound processor, the famous SID
• Loading and saving from tape.
• That weird serial implementation of IEEE488 that the VIC 20 had, with the bug removed... but a with a twist.
• Cartridge, and a port for hooking up a modem. And a monitor port. And, well, ports.

So if the C64 was so much technically better, why the schoolyard arguments? Other than kids “not knowing” because they didn't understand the technical issues, or wanting to justify their parents getting the slightly cheaper machine? Well, it was because the details mattered.

• Both systems had BASIC, but Commodore 64 BASIC was terrible.
• The extra 16k of RAM was a nice to have, but in the end both machines were in the same ballpark. (Oddly the machine in the UK considered to be superior to both, the BBC Micro, only had 32k.)
• Programmers loved the 160x200 4 colour mode. It meant there was less “colour clash”, an artifact issue resulting from limiting the palette per character cell. But oddly, the kids were split on that. Most preferred higher resolution graphics over less colour clashing issues. So even though the Commodore 64 was superior technologically, it was encouraging programmers to do things that were unpopular. One factor there was that most kids were hooking up the computer to their parent's spare TV, which was usually monochrome.
• The keyboard really didn't matter, to kids. Especially given the computer was being used to play games, and Sinclair's quirky keyword input system and proto-IDE was arguably slightly more productive for BASIC programming than a “normal” keyboard in a world full of new typists.
• Both computers loaded and saved from tape, but the Spectrum used commodity cassette recorders and loaded and saved programs at a higher speed, around 1500bps vs 300bps.
• The IEEE488 over serial thing was... just not under consideration. Floppy drives were an expensive luxury that didn't take off until the 16 bit era in the UK when it came to home computers. But, worse, the Spectrum actually ended up being the better choice if random access storage was important to you. Sinclair released a system called the ZX Microdrive, similar to the American stringy-floppy concept (except smaller! Comparable to 2-3 full size SD cards stacked on top of one another), where the drives and interface for the Spectrum came to less than 100GBP (and additional drives were somewhere in the region of 50GBP.) The Commodore floppy drives, on the other hand, cost 300-500GBP each. Worse, they were slower than they'd been on the VIC 20 (about as slow as the cassette drive no less!), despite the hardware bug being fixed, because the computer couldn't keep up with the incoming data.
• Cartridge ports should also have been a point in Commodore's favour, but for some reason cartridges were very expensive compared to software on tape. (I didn't learn until the 2000s that cartridges were actually cheaper to make.)
• The other ports were for things kids just weren't interested in. Modems? In Britain's metered phone call system they just weren't going to be used by anyone under the age of 25. Monitors? TVs are cheaper and you can watch TV shows on them!

Over time many of these issues were resolved. Fast loaders improved the Commodore 64 software loading times, though the Spectrum had them too. But in the mean time, the kids didn't see the two platforms as “Cheap Spectrum vs Technically Amazing C64”, they were seen as equals, and to be honest, I don't think it was completely unfair in that context they were seen that way. There's no doubt the C64, with its sound and sprites, was the superior machine, but the slow cassette interface and expensive and broken peripheral system undermined the machine. As did programmers using features the kids didn't like.

Go across the pond and, sure, nobody would compare the TS2068 with the C64. Americans weren't using tape drives with their C64s. But I'm still not sure why they'd compare the TS2068 to the VIC 20 either.

The Spectrum benefited from its fairly lightweight limited spec. Not only did it undercut the more advanced C64 on price, it also meant it didn't launch with as many unsolvable hardware bugs. The result was Sinclair and third parties could sell the add-ons needed to make the Spectrum equal or better its otherwise technically superior rivals, and the entire package still ended up costing less. In the mean time, the feature set on launch was closer to what the market – kids who just wanted a cheap computer to hook up to their parent's spare TV set to play games – wanted.

All of which said, the TS2068 probably didn't fail because Americans were comparing it to the VIC 20, so much as it being released late and the home computer market being already decided by that point. Word of mouth mattered and nobody would have been going into a computer store in 1984 undecided about what computer to buy. Timex Sinclair had already improved the TS2068 over the Spectrum by adding a dedicated sound chip, and could have added sprites, and maybe even integrated the microdrives into the system, and fixed the keyboard, and not added much to the cost (the microdrives were technologically simpler than cassette recorders, so I suspect would have cost under $10 each to add) and the system would still have bombed. It was too late, the C64 and Apple II/IBM PC dominated the popular and high ends of the US market respectively, there wasn't any space for another home computer.