I'd disagree, my folks who were both working class saved for about two years to get me a BBC Micro B. My dad wouldn't let me have anything less after seeing Spectrums, C64's etc in the shops at the time, he figured they were (in his words, not mine :) ) cheap toys.

I in the meantime pleaded for them to let me get a Spectrum, or basically anything; I ended up going to friends houses for my computer fix :)

But I'm very glad they patiently scrimped and saved for the BBC and made me wait. The built-in 6502 assembler was one of the first things I learned, it was a joy to use. That machine kicked off my career in software development, it was well worth the wait.

The Spectrum and ZX81 were super-affordable, so a lot of working class families bought them, often as games machines at Christmas.

Some of those kids made a career out of them. If you programmed a game you could set up a business for the price of some cheap print ads and cassette labels.

The BBC was for (mostly) posh parents who could afford the inflation adjusted equivalent of £1500 to £2500 (with disk drives) on something more serious. It was really the UK's Apple II.

But they were still cheap computers. An S-100 business system would cost between two and five times as much as a BBC, and a low-end minicomputer like a PDP-8 or low-spec PDP-11 would be more like five to ten times as much.

IMO Acorn lost out by selling to education. If they'd sold a rebadged version as a business machine with support they'd have stormed the market.

I think the business market was the target of the Torch/Acorn joint venture, which never really got off the ground:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torch_Computers#Acorn_Computer...

It's all relative, but I managed to get a Dragon 32 after they went bust despite growing up on and off benefits.

I don't think we could afford anything, but I could over a period of time build my own.

Nice! I wish I had been smart enough to do that.