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 ca

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.