European Home Computers
by Donald Phillipson (Ottawa)
8 Nov. 1987
When recently in Europe, I was surprised by several aspects of home
computing there. Following are some notes, semi-organized in two groups,
the commercial market and the public domain.
National Markets for Home Computers
Retail prices for computers in England were about what I had ex-
pected, e.g. 500 pounds ($700) for the new Amstrad PCW 9512 Z80 system
(including monitor and D.W. printer), 800 pounds ($1136) for a cut-price
XT clone, or 1300 pounds for an AT clone with a 20 megabyte hard disk.
Amstrad 1640 MS-DOS machines, currently advertized in Canada for
$1300 (one floppy and mono screen), sell in England for less than $1000
and the cheapest HP LaserJet printer for 1500 pounds ($2130). The pound
sterling has inflated unbelievably (to someone whose first wage was less
than four pounds a week, now the price of four pints of beer) but soft-
ware seems cheap. Most Borland packages advertized at $99 (U.S.) sell
in Britain for 49 pounds (less than $90 U.S.)
Holland was the big surprise - I got the impression there that one
can buy many machines we are familiar with, e.g. MS-DOS clones, Atari ST,
Amiga etc., for the same figures in guilders as we would pay here in
Canadian dollars, but the guilder stands at about 70 cents! A Phillips-
made MS-DOS machine costs 2800 guilders, including monitor, and an in-
ternal modem 350 guilders. $2200 Canadian seems quite reasonable.
By contrast, prices in Denmark are just incredible, $380 (1900
Danish crowns) for a Commodore 1541 disk drive, or $1220 (6100 crowns)
for the Amstrad Joyce, one of the most popular European CP/M machines!
My collection of magazines and advertisements does not show any prices
for MS-DOS clones in Denmark, but I imagine they are similarly high.
Friends there use a British-made Ferranti (flaky and not recommended)
and a Commodore PC10 (reliable and good value, possibly bought in Germany
anyway.)
The obvious point of technical difference is that cassette drives
are still being sold in Europe for mass storage. New floppy drives sell
in Europe for $200 or more, and used ones for $100. It might be because
the floppy drive is American technology and the cassette European, or
because of market prices of drives. But we have had the benefits for
five years, while Europeans are going blind keying in software from mag-
azine listings (see below).
I made no attempt to survey stores systematically, but there was
an obvious difference between Holland and England. Conditions in The
Hague reminded me of Ottawa, a cluster of cut-price clone houses and a
few IBM and Apple list-price stores downtown, and a substantial sprink-
ling of neighborhood computer stores in the suburbs, with Commodores and
clones. There were plenty of clone stores in Oxford, and a number of
Amstrad and similar machines in hi-fi shops. In London, by contrast, I
noticed no neighborhood stores in the one suburb where I stayed, and
hardly any in the downtown shopping district (e.g. along Oxford Street
from Selfridges as far as London University). The eye-catcher in the
English capital was two or three Computerland signs, each standing over
an empty and deserted store.
Am I right in thinking that Computerland sold a lot of Apples in
North America? Apples demonstrate important differences between the
European and American markets. They never caught on in Europe the way
they did in North America, apparently for the reasons of language and
price. In England, where language presented no obstacle, Apples were
high-priced in the late 1970s because the dollar stood high. Operating
systems such as Sinclair and the BBC computer competed directly with
Apple. Apple is now marketing Macs energetically, but I have no impres-
sion that the company has yet made much of a mark in Europe.
In countries like Germany, Apples encountered no domestic competi-
tion when new on the market, but the different language did delay the
marketing process for several years, so that Commodore 64s and CP/M
machines seem to have occupied on the continent the market niche filled
by the Apple II here. Denmark seems to be recapitulating the pattern in
Germany and Benelux, only a couple of years later and at higher prices,
because the Danish-language market is so small. By the way, documenta-
tion in European languages is always expensive, I saw Dutch and Germany
translations of familiar items, e.g. Peter McWilliams's books for begin-
ners and the Osborne CP/M guide, but at about double the prices we have
to pay. The best German magazine I saw with any CP/M content, Happy
Computer, cost me 18 Dutch florins or more than $12. In London the lar-
ger and better Personal Computer World cost 1 pound 20 pence or less than
$3. Book prices in England have doubled in recent years. The stock I
saw there was skimpy by our standards and the prices a shade higher,
both for English and American computer books.
In Holland there seemed to be almost as many English-language man-
uals (from Britain as well as the U.S.A.) on sale as those in Dutch or
German. Relevant factors here are that English is so well taught in
continental high schools and that both operating system commands (viz.
CP/M, MS-DOS) and programming languages such as Pascal BASIC are English-
oriented. Many users may find the quality of a manual more important
than the language in which the text is written.
Operating Systems
There are interesting contrasts here. In general, although there
are new CP/M machines in Dutch and English stores, they are obviously
games-oriented (color monitors, joysticks, etc.) Except for the Amstrad
line (called Schneider on the continent) I saw no CP/M business machines.
More generally, MS-DOS dominates the continental market for home
as well as business micros much as it does here. OS/2 has barely peeked
over the horizon, Commodore 64s seem to be common for kids, and there is
a small demand for 68000 machines, but not for business purposes. Local
conditions of hardware sales and staff training seemed to my eye much the
same as here. Not least, nine out of 10 store salesmen recommend the
MS-DOS system to all customers for all purposes.
(My businessman brother-in-law happened to be pricing a new system
during my visit. I was vastly intrigued by his old outfit, a Sharp Z80
machine with no disk operating system at all! The whole thing ran in
interpreted BASIC, and its word-processing programme module felt rather
like riding a bicycle with ten-sided wooden wheels. At the end of a
line, although it wrapped automatically, you had to slow down or else
the interpreter would drop characters. You could save a file of more
than 66 lines, but printing was done in units of a page at a time, al-
though you could concatenate filenames to print a multi-page letter.
Its software was an integrated business package, capable of doing job
estimates and payroll and taxes all from the same data disks, with total
reliability. It probably seemed in 1980 as blindingly fast and compli-
cated as the operator, my Aunt Greetje, now feels MS-DOS is.
But England is different. Because there are still several compet-
ing operating systems in the market (e.g. BBC and CP/M as well as MS-DOS)
MS-DOS dominates in business computing but not overall as it does on the
continent. In general, I saw fewer computers in British stores, of-
fices, libraries, etc. than I had done on the continent. English people
with skills are as skilled as any you have ever met, or read in Byte etc.
(I think of a crystallographer at London University, who has developed
amazing ability programming on an Amiga, in BASID, color pictures of
crystal structures to give to his students.) I cannot help feeling that
the local environment supports fewer able enthusiasts than ours does in
North America.
Public Domain and Modems
One of the main limitations in the English and European environ-
ment, it seems to me, is incredibly simple - there, you have to pay for
local telephone calls. This is not a conspiracy of the phone companies
but at least partly a mere habit. In France, Germany, England, etc.,
phone companies have always charged for local calls, as well as charging
a monthly line rental fee, and they are not going to change now.
But this is a disincentive against telecomputing in two respects.
Fewer people have domestic telephones in Europe than here, so that there
are fewer people to call. The charge for local calls is a small but
concrete deterrence against many types of activity with which we are
familiar, whether just calling up the local university library cata-
logues, or checking in once a week with the half-dozen boards each of
us monitors, let alone feverish hackers calling up every database they
can discover, just to explore.
To the extent that there is simply less of all these types of ac-
tivity in Europe than here, there is proportionately less to encourage
beginners (all of us were beginners at some time or other) to buy modems
and use them. The local environment for amateur computing is less rich
and less rewarding than in North America. There is more than one reason
for this. The lack of an European (let alone world-wide) technical
standard for data transmission is obviously very important. But I still
think that the relative scarcity of telephones and charges for local
phone calls in Europe are by themselves fundamental.
The consequences are general. There are far fewer free public
bulletin boards in Europe than here. Ottawa, with a half-million people,
has for several years supported more than 60 boards. London's 7 million
people had 33 boards available to them in October, according to PC World.
Admittedly half the boards we can call for free are by and for kids and
few last long. But they provide irreplaceable personal experience in
systems maintenance and, sometimes, programming and debugging. (I am
reminded of the difference between the North American and European armies
in the Second World War, where it made a very practical difference that
the typical American or Canadian soldier could drive a car or truck,
while the typical English or German soldier could not, having never had
the chance to practice.)
The salient point is that, here, any kid with a computer, a phone
line, and the minimum level of skill can open up a bulletin board with
the expectation that someone will call in, since it costs nothing. If
almost no one does, the operator has still (we hope) learned something,
at no cost except his time. In Europe, you could never escape the know-
ledge that calling in costs your callers hard cash. The material en-
vironment of bulletin boards is thus fundamentally different.
I have no figures with which to back up these opinions, but I judge
that, for the same general reasons, there is less public domain software
in general circulation in Europe than here. What's there is as good as
what we have but there is much less of it. In combination with unsatis-
factory technical standards, this may even affect the hardware market,
by reducing economies of scale. We can buy, new in a store, a 1200 baud
modem for $100 or less. English prices are more than five times that.
If we can afford the long-distance charges, we can phone anywhere among
250 million people in the expectation that we can make a good connection.
There is not yet any agreed European technical standard for 300 baud data
transmission and, reciprocally, demand is so much less that standards are
being negotiated with glacial slowness - possibly in part because Britain
was the first country to promulgate a national standard for 300 baud that
is incompatible with Bell's 103 standard. European computer users know
what modems are, of course, but they seem to be stuck at the present
speed of development. If there were a single dominant operating system,
or a known source of free public domain software, or adequate technical
standards, the cost of telephoning might no longer be a significant bar-
rier to telecomputing. So long as none of those incentives is present,
cost remains a strong disincentive.
There is some familiar public-domain software around. Names like
QMODEM and functions like SQueeze or file-handling, but there is a dif-
ference in the pattern. "Shareware" is a familiar concept, but LiBRary
and ARChive seem not to be - at least in the commercial ads I have seen
for public domain software. Such distribution is not particularly cheap,
from 2 pounds per program (which seems high) to 6 pounds a disk which,
if full, is reasonable. My impression is that most of the mail-order
public domain software is for MS-DOS only. It looks like an extension
of the PC-SIG distribution system, priced 30 per cent higher.
In England at least, high-quality and cheap computer magazines seem
to compensate in part for the shortage of bulletin boards. England has
talent, demonstrated in software, emulators and add-ons for Macintoshes
etc., and a national style, exemplified in the BBC and Amstrad machines.
Both prefer color monitors, even on Z80 machines, their buyers are wil-
ling to put up with slow cassette loading on cheaper machines, and both
offer RAMdisk software in high-capacity CP/M systems to compensate for
the absence of a second disk drive on most standard units.
The English national style in software seems to be exemplified in
the PC World magazine's "Program of the Month" for October 1987. Written
by a college biochemist, it seems to do very well what it sets out to do,
viz. draw diagrams of proteins. It is practical in its orientation to
cheap dot-matrix printers and simple MS-DOS clones (using a RAMdisk to
speed up disk operations.) While well-structured and commented, the
program is in BASIC and interpreter BASIC at that. Finally, it is dis-
tributed as 700 lines of code to key in yourself, no reference is made
in the magazine to availability over the phone or on disk.
German and Dutch magazines also take for granted that their readers
are willing to key in long chunks of code. Through such devices, CP/M
is still alive in Europe. Version 3 of CP/M is the commonest OS of
choice on English Amstrads and continental Schneiders, which are the
same machines. I should guess that we in North America could still
profit from the quality of the best European CP/M programming and the
Europeans rather more from any greater interchange, because of the sheer
quantity of public-domain CP/M software we enjoy (some 50,000 programs
or more being available by estimates of knowledgeable observers.)
This last point is a sort of hobby-horse of mine, because I am a
cultural historian, specializing in the history of science for a number
of intrinsic and professional reasons. One of the themes of this spe-
ciality is the unique "economics of knowledge." There are economic laws
that seem to govern the supply and price of material goods pretty well
and even "services," such as laundry, pop music, politics, teaching, etc.
"Knowledge" is different, not least because it is divided. Technological
knowledge (typically patentable information, trade secrets etc.) varies
in value according to scarcity and demand, like goods, but not scientific
knowledge, which seems to follow a completely different set of rules. The
most important scientific truths are those that everyone "owns." i.e.,
their value is not correlated with scarcity but with how widely they are
diffused. This seems to apply to a number of other aspects of culture,
such as Shakespeare, the Bible, architecture, etc., which are not valued
by scarcity but by how many people share them.
Brain-work, such as programming, looks like technological knowledge
but computer programming has developed in a divergent and paradoxical
way. A few people like Mitchell Kapor (founder of Lotus) proceeded by
inventing something good, deliberately monopolizing its distribution for
profit, and became rich and one hopes happy. Others like Kemeny and
Kurtz, Richard Conn, Ward Christensen, Irv Hoff, etc. have written soft-
ware that has been (I dare say) of equal social value and just given it
away free, for fun, to anyone who wanted to use it.
This is an important social phenomenon, not necessarily new, but
neglected by some of the theoreticians I know (who have been grappling
with the processes of invention, valuation, and distribution of scienti-
fic knowledge.) Starting as a totally naive computer user, I have been
materially helped and constantly cheered by the amount of free help I
got from users as well as programmers, who possess knowledge and are
glad to give it away for nothing. People still writing public domain
software, and even I dare say Sysops, still belong to this elect band,
who persist in doing real work, for no economic reward, because they en-
joy it, whatever Adam Smith or John Kenneth Galbraith might say about it.
The phenomenon is not unique. It goes on all over the world, from
church bazaars to old men who take children fishing. But in the special
case of computers, I suspect that the vast pool of free knowledge shared
by Canadian and American users has both a positive social value today and
for all I can tell, economic value in the future as well.
It is not an absolute thing, but when you compare the social in-
frastructure of home computing here with that in Europe, it is impossible
not to conclude that we are far better off, for a combination of reasons
ranging from free local phone calls to the real work done by programmers,
Sysops, and people willing to sort out strangers' problems with their new
computers. It is an intellectual puzzle for the professional historian
of culture and a moral point too, because if the benefits of this "un-
economic" activity are as great as they seem to be, we ought to spread
the word so that everyone can join in if they feel like it.
I have no great insights yet, but would welcome comments!
end