I’ve always found it interesting how the 8-bit era differed between the UK and the US. The BBC Micro, the Speccy, the Acorn machines, for the most part none of them made it across the Atlantic except for the ZX-80/81 and a modified Beeb, and those didn’t fare so well. I guess the difference in analog TV standards didn’t help back in an era when a TV set was your monitor, and in the case of the Sinclair machines, the membrane keyboards didn’t help, either.
One unfortunate thing that happened (which I was reminded of here), is that with the move away from the 8-bit machines, we’ve mostly lost the idea of having an easily accessible and easy-to-learn programming environment available on boot, especially on mainstream systems. There’s nothing like a BASIC (or Python for today’s era) environment present when you boot a Windows or MacOS system. While the Raspberry Pi with Raspbian corrects this to a great degree, it’s not something that the lion’s share of people are going to encounter unless they’re already hobbyists or use it in school.
