>As somebody who grew up with the Amstrad CPC in France (it was the best selling 8-bit micro there), I've always found the cult status of the ZX Spectrum in the

>As somebody who grew up with the Amstrad CPC in France (it was the best selling 8-bit micro there), I've always found the cult status of the ZX Spectrum in the UK difficult to rationalise. IMO, it's the biggest f**ing rose-tinted reality distortion field in all of retrocomputing. I don't get it either. 64 was and is clearly the better choice over Spectrum—superior in every single way other than perhaps the BASIC—but the relatively small price difference even then (and even more 40 years later) was enough to cause many Britons to choose the latter. That said, there is a reason why 64 dominated the wealthier US, Canada, Germany, and Australia. The only explanation I can come up with is that we all feel nostalgia for our youth, no matter the circumstances. But there is a difference between respecting the creativity borne of technical limits (what happens with ZX81), and actually celebrating those limits as virtues as happens with Spectrum. One might feel nostalgic for the happy days of youth, even if one grew up in a poor ghetto. But not so much if one associated with others with better living quarters. Nowhere in the UK is a town where families could only afford Spectrums; rather, every schoolyard rang with debates between Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, and BBC Micro owners on their computers' merits. (They all uniformly pitied the owners of Oric, Dragon, and other true also-rans in the UK market.) It's one thing as a 13-year old Spectrum user to stand up to the taunts of the C64 owners by bravely citing any possible superiority (or, in this case, minimizing the uniform inferiority), but to still do so 40 years later?!?