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From: Richard Atkinson
Date: 2002-03-02
Subject: Re: Plus 4 1541 disk drive

On Sat, 2 Mar 2002, MagerValp wrote:

> RF> I've just got a secondhan 1541 disk drive for the first time
> RF> ever(wow floppies:-)
>
> Sheesh, you british people. How could you stand using tapes in the
> first place? :)

Because we were poor! Britain had been hit very hard in the 1970s by the trade unions / Labour government and again in 1981 with Mrs Thatcher's rather "laissez-faire" policy on the recession. After that, a kind of inertia set in - although Amstrad released the Spectrum +3 with a built-in disk drive in 1988, we'd all got so used to tape loading (and the nice prices of tape games) that it was extremely hard to market a disk machine that was much more expensive than the tape versions and ran disks that were (comparing game prices) between 2x and 4x the price. There was no possibility for the same kind of economies of scale that tape games enjoyed.

Richard