h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sinclair:
"sporting between 48 and 128kb of RAM" - the original "standard" Spectrum had 16k of RAM, not 48k.

"QL...used the powerful formula processing language Forth" - No, it didn't. It used BASIC. And I have never heard of Forth described as a "powerful formula processing language" before, despite programming it for several years. I suspect you're confusing it with FORTRAN.

Commodore:
"...a comparatively poor processor in the form of the 6502" - actually, it was the 6510, a different processor from the same family.

"...the first to feature sprites " - Probably not. I believe the Atari 400 came first - I was playing with an Atari 400, sprites and all, while Commodore was still pushing the VIC-20 as its flagship home PC. (They had to rename it the VC20 in Europe because "VIC" turned out to be a slang reference to masturbation in one of the Germanic regions...! )

"...the Amiga (a project they bought from Atari" - No, they didn't. They bought out a privately owned company called Amiga Inc. whose founders included one of the designers of the Atari 400/800's graphics subsystem. This is probably what led to the misconception that Atari was behind the company.

(The Amiga deserves a mention too as the first commercial microcomputer to sport a proper multi-tasking operating system as standard...)

Acorn:
"...their first computer, called simply the Atom" - they had a number of computers before the Atom - I used to sell them! They were modular in design, and the two best-selling were imaginitively titled the Acorn System One and (wait for it) the Acorn System Two...! They were popular with school science departments and laboratories on a limited budget, as you could easily add i/o and instrumentation modules to automate experiments.

"The processor used was the same as in the Commodore 64..." - Nope, this one really *was* a 6502!

Atari:
"As is noted above, Atari originally had the rights to the Amiga name..." - as noted above, no they didn't.

(Why no mention of the Atari 400 and 800? Their multiple screen resolutions, layerable sprites and sound made them the real "breakthrough" machines of the decade, IMHO...)

It's possibly also worth mentioning that the Dragon and BBC Micros were the only popular systems at the time which decided to go for an analogue joystick interface, and the Dragon was the only one of the two to include it as standard in its basic machine. (It was an option for the BBC Model "A")

I'm a pedant by nature, and will always jump on what I believe to be factual errors - please don't take it personally! I really like the article, and we could do with more nostalgia like this...

Peet
("I love these times! I lived through these times!" - Jadzia Dax, ST:DS9, Trials and Tribble-ations)