Eye of the beholder (no, not that one)

[Gryzor]

So I've been reading The Computers that Made Britain and I found this little gem:

Curry had good reason to detest the Amstrad rival. Its £229 incarnation not only came with 64kB of RAM, it also included a dedicated monitor and a built-in cassette drive. As a thing of beauty, it fell some distance behind the sleek Electron; as a thing of value, there was only one winner. 

Meanwhile (for those that don't remember), the Electron:

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[rexbeng]

I can only judge based on photos, but purely aesthetically the Electron is above the 464. Surely this lies to the fact that the Amstrad computers had to pack everything within one casing, but the result is the electron looks tighter, with the nice slope that makes the side-view more curvy and the print makes the whole thing look a bit more 'futuristic' than the 464 which looks more like a monolithic "toy". However charming, the 464 is a 'designer-nightmare' to me, and the person who decided on putting those cursor keys up there should be condemned to spend his after-life in the artistic hells of Bosch.

[Gryzor]

The pros and cons of the 464 design have been discussed many times before. Each to their own - I happen to like it very much. But calling the Electron brick "sleek"... Ehhhh. It's as basic and boring as it can be within its functional limitations (for instance, the Speccy is much prettier but the Electron had to accommodate a real keyboard)

[pelrun]

Yeah, the 464 was very much Sugar's "mug's eyeful". The minimalism of the Electron's design helps a lot here - I have modern mechanical keyboards that aren't *that* much different.

Had a discussion with another local CPC owner on the weekend about the 464's cursor keys - they're a nightmare, but they're a nightmare in a sea of other nonsensical options. At least you get all four of them, unlike on the C64!

[rexbeng]

Well, I guess it would be very fair to say the Electron is more sleek than the 464. With regards to the Spectrum, I wouldnt call the first incarnation 'sleek' as it pretty much looks like a calculator without the LCD stripe. The second incarnation (the '+') however, I find it really beautiful.

[asertus]

I can only judge based on photos, but purely aesthetically the Electron is above the 464. Surely this lies to the fact that the Amstrad computers had to pack everything within one casing, but the result is the electron looks tighter, with the nice slope that makes the side-view more curvy and the print makes the whole thing look a bit more 'futuristic' than the 464 which looks more like a monolithic "toy". However charming, the 464 is a 'designer-nightmare' to me, and the person who decided on putting those cursor keys up there should be condemned to spend his after-life in the artistic hells of Bosch.

Actually, I see a refurbished copy of C64 design.. Btw, cursor keys are not in better place in Acorn..

[andycadley]

Having seen an Electron in real life, since we had some at school, I thought they were one of the ugliest machines of the 80s. And I seem to recall the keyboard was not very nice to type on either (not Sinclair bad, but still pretty horrific).

[rexbeng]

I think most of the computers in the era were being designed around the necessity to integrate the standard 'typewriter' type keyboard, so it's natural they have many similarities (the few models that didnt go that route are the ones to stand out, like the Spectrum +). But even if so, the Electron would be a design-upgrade as it appears to be 1/3 less in width compared to the bread-bin C64.

[abalore]

Looking at the technical details it doesn't look like a great machine, but it has something I never understood why is not in the CPC: Text modes. With this, the CPC BASIC games would run many times faster, because a text mode is just a rudimentary hardware sprite support.

[cwpab]

Didn't even know about this Electron thing. Apparently it was compatible with the BBC Micro, but games ran at around half the speed.

But the topic is about the looks of it, and I must say: the Electron ALMOST manages to look pretty slick... that's it, until you see the black rectangle with silly, green, rectangular "VR-Tron-it's-the-future" lines. Just make it all white, man... What were they thinking?

Or at least put something useful there, even some key command information. It looks like a cheap sticker pasted there to hide some crack.

Any CPC model looks better just because of this. CPC look like toys, but at least they have visual consistency.

[reidrac]

Acorn had interesting machines, a friend had BITD an Archimedes and he says it was amazingly advanced for the time.

Shame their Acorn RISC Machine thing (later Advanced RISC Machines, and now just ARM) didn't get far. Oh, wait!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers

[Prodatron]

I have most (?) of Acorn's 8-bit machines (2x BBC, 2x Master, 1x Electron, 1x Atom), and in my opinion they look duller and more old-fashioned, but also more serious (for this time) than an Amstrad CPC.

But what's really special about them is that they're all full of heavy metal. As for the radiation, they were really paranoid at this time

[robcfg]

Despite its flaws, the Electron is a nice machine to play with.

And if you want some nice games, check 0xC0DE6502's productions here: https://github.com/0xC0DE6502

Electrobots being my favorite