Elite was Braben and Bell on their Acorn Atom, which became the BBC Micro. Original Elite was tied into BBC Micro specific things such as how the display worke

Elite was Braben and Bell on their Acorn Atom, which became the BBC Micro. Original Elite was tied into BBC Micro specific things such as how the display worked, BBC Elite had a split display mode with black and white high-resolution at the top (Mode zero) and four colour 'mode two' at the bottom, for the 'dashboard'. The AY-3-8912 sound card in the BBC Micro was also part of it. On the Spectrum there was just the beeper, and the display was not capable of those clever modes that Braben/Bell amazed everyone with. I will explain the problem with rutabaga... In northern Europe, nobody wants to eat rutabaga (swede) because that was what people ate when there was nothing else to eat, it was poverty food, best fed to the animals. Actually swede is a fine vegetable, I eat swede all the time, but I never went through a famine. With the kit form ZX81, imagine being an eleven year old in the cold with a soldering iron and a Sinclair kit-form ZX81, knowing that the most you will get out of it is 1K Chess, when your friends are playing JetSet Willy on a Spectrum or better, no need for this wholesome electronics stuff, just mainlining the good stuff, as in games. We were just kidding ourselves about microcomputers and programming, think of your peers and how many of them ever had working code to share with you. It never happened.