Its a bit like my Oric Telestrat, which was an upgrade to the Oric-1 -> Atmos machines, in that it gave a full 64k and had expansion options.

Sure was a wild and woolly period of computing - so many wonderful machines, too many different ways to develop things. Just like today, only cuter ..

The Telestrat seems to fit more in the second wave of the original 8 bit era - with the Spectrum +2, the C=128, and so on. The SAM and the C65 which this piece talks about were later (late eighties, not mid eighties) and seem to have been much more capable machines: the SAM, for example, had 256K of RAM, expandable to 4.5M, 6 channel stereo sound, and a 6MHz processor (compare to the Atari ST or Amiga 500's 68K running at 7.1-8MHz - vs. the Spectrum's Z80 at 3.5MHz and the C=64's 6502 at 1MHz). This was really about trying to create 8-bit machines which could survive in the 16-bit era, easing the transition for users and developers.

Then the whole lot got eaten by the PC.

I agree with your comment, mostly.

Just mention that comparing MHz is not quite right in that era. For example Speccy's 3.5MHz were not that much of an advantage compared with the 1MHz of the C64 if you take into account that it didn't have hardware sprites and all had to be implemented by software, 48K models didn't have dedicated audio chip, etc.

The lack of hardware sprites was easily overcome by the raw speed of the spectrums CPU. Also at anything other than sprite focused games, ie vector graphics or the like the Spectrum smoked the C64. And even with sprites the C64 hardware was limited to 8 before you had to do strange multiplexing.

Sound wise the C64 was better but in terms of speed the Spectrum dominated.

I am just delighted to have sparked a Speccy/C=64 'which is best' fight, on hacker news, in 2015. Keep that flame alive!

Of course, it goes without saying that the spectrum was best.

I didn't say what was best, I said that comparing "only" MHz is missing part of the picture. Today machines are easier to compare because they have similar functionality, but back in the day it was different.

I had a ZX Spectrum +2A back in the day and I've programmed several games for the speccy, and the attribute clash was a pain :)

It's well know that Speccy is more funnier that the C64 :D

I'm enjoying the fact that the Telestrat sparked it. ;)

True, thats the right context - in my case though, the Telestrat was "the machine that almost made it to the 90's" in a similar fashion.

It was a great time to be interested in computers. Much complexity, many options, and so little time .. which eventually ran out for all of it. Only a handful of us are still using these machines for things these days..