Top-10 worst computers
There's been some truly ghastly rubbish made since Colossus cracked its first wartime code
"Where there's muck, there's brass," goes the old Yorkshire saying. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. And the computer industry has churned out more than its fair share of silicon muck, over the years, in pursuit of consumers' and business's brass.
Indeed, there are so many candidates for Computing's Top-Ten Worst Computers that it makes it especially challenging to hone down even a shortlist, let alone line 'em up and decide which deserves the title of the all-time worst computer ever made.
Obviously, this is all our opinion: our methodology is entirely subjective, so feel free to flame us over our arbitrary selection - and suggest a few of your own.
[Next page: Number 10, the Comx-35]
Top-10 worst computers
There's been some truly ghastly rubbish made since Colossus cracked its first wartime code
10. Comx-35
In the home computer "revolution" of the early 1980s, distributors were desperate to rush new and exciting* computers into shops. Too desperate, perhaps. The Comx-35 didn't spend long on computer dealers' shelves, and not for the right reasons.
It sported an adequate 32 kilobytes of RAM - this was the 1980s, don't forget - and an RCA 1802 microprocessor running at 2.8MHz. This choice of microprocessor could only be described as non-standard as most other eight-bit home computers used either the Zilog Z80A, MOS Technology 6502 or, at a push, the Motorola 6809.
The machine's key gimmick was the little joystick on the right-hand side of the keyboard. But it was destined not to get used much as there never was much software for the machine.
And, if you wanted to type in your own, Comx Basic offered a terrific bug whereby typing in the line number 65,535 caused the machine to crash, which must've been terribly upsetting for anyone who'd stayed up late coding a long programme...
Neither this, nor the spec' - nor even the idiosyncratic choice of microprocessor - were necessarily the biggest problem: some 35 per cent of them arrived faulty.
After getting tired of refunding frustrated users, distributor Computers for All reportedly recalled the lot, put them in a crate and shipped them on a slow boat back to their makers in Hong Kong. The internet indicates that a fair few people still have one of these in their lofts, but it's a good bet that they're no longer working now, even if they were when they bought them.
*ghastly and awful
Pictured: A Comx-35 in a box, which is the best place for it. Image via www.old-computers.com
[Next: Number nine, the Elan "Flan" Enterprise]
Top-10 worst computers
There's been some truly ghastly rubbish made since Colossus cracked its first wartime code
9. The Elan "Flan" Enterprise
When the Elan Enterprise was pre-announced at the What Computer? show in London in 1983, just as the fervour for home computers reached its peak, there was a fair bit of excitement over what might be on offer - up to 128 kilobytes of RAM! A built-in word processor! 80-column text! High-resolution graphics of 640 by 512 pixels! A Z80 microprocessor running at 4MHz! A dinky built-in joystick!!!
The company, wisely, didn't take pre-orders at the event. This was just as well as buyers would've had to have waited two years for their new machines to be delivered.
Everything pretty much went wrong from that moment onwards, starting with the name: nobody had bothered to check the copyright of the word "Elan" and, after stern letters from m'leared friends, this had to be changed.
When it was leaked that the company (apparently) planned to merely shift one letter - changing it from "Elan" to "Flan" - hilarity ensued and the company never recovered from the much-deserved mockery.
By the time the "Enterprise", as the company decided to call it, emerged the Amstrad CPC-464 offered more for less and the 16-bit Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were just around the corner. Only 80,000 were ever made, with the last 20,000 dumped on the Hungarian market.
Pictured: The Elan Flan Enterprise. Image via Wikipedia
[Next: Number eight, the ICL Goldrush]
Top-10 worst computers
There's been some truly ghastly rubbish made since Colossus cracked its first wartime code
8. ICL Goldrush
This is what most Computing readers would recognise as a "proper" computer.
The Goldrush could be described as the last hurrah of ICL, Britain's "national champion" computer maker, which in the 1960s was going to lead the charge into the "white heat of technology" (© Harold Wilson).
A massively-paralleling processing (MPP) server, it was also massively expensive, and reportedly justified by ICL's CEO Peter Bonfield - now Sir Peter Bonfield - as follows: "It's called Goldrush because we wanna make money and we wanna do it in a hurry."
They didn't. Sir Peter, who went on to lead BT through an ill-judged dot-com boom acquisition spree, could've been described as a poor man's Lord Sugar. However, he wasn't quite as good at selling: ICL reportedly flogged just 19 Goldrush servers, pretty much all of them to rivals, who bought them purely to open them up and see what was inside.
After the failure of the machine, ICL was prevailed upon by its parent Fujitsu to give up on hardware. Fujitsu absorbed the carcass, including ICL's struggling PC business, changed its name and re-focused what was left onto computer services.
This was a shame as the machine was actually pretty good technology. Just obsolete, with the market choosing symmetric multi-processing (SMP) machines in preference to MPP.
Pictured: A proper computer. Image via history.cs.ncl.ac.uk
[Next: Number seven, the Texet Laser 200]
Top-10 worst computers
There's been some truly ghastly rubbish made since Colossus cracked its first wartime code
7. Texet Laser 200
By some perverse twist of fate, this was briefly sold by retail chain WH Smith when it wanted to get into home computers, but didn't actually know much about them. Thankfully, Smiths quickly worked out that the Sinclair Spectrum was where it was at, dumped its stock of Laser 200s and sold the Spectrum instead.
The main marketing claim of the Laser 200 was that it was (briefly) the cheapest colour home computer on the market. Breaking the £100 price barrier, the machine sported a Zilog Z80A microprocessor running at 3.6MHz, with a Motorola 6847 video chip running alongside it. However, the video chip didn't seem to do much given the truly terrible graphics on offer: just 128 by 64 pixels with three foreground colours.
Built by Hong Kong's Vtech, better known for making children's toys, the Laser 200 actually shifted some 200,000 units in Australia and the company went on to double-down on this success by making an Apple-II compatible machine - in 1985, more than a year after Apple had launched the Mac.
Pictured: Once, briefly, the cheapest colour computer in the world. Also quite nasty. Image via www.old-computers.com
[Next: Number six, the Acorn NetStation]
Top-10 worst computers
There's been some truly ghastly rubbish made since Colossus cracked its first wartime code
6. Acorn NetStation
When Larry Ellison started burbling on about the "network computer" (NC) in 1996, it might have been because he was ahead of his time, or because he wanted to try and undermine rival Microsoft in some way - probably the latter.
But the-then struggling computer maker Acorn was happy to jump on board and provided, lickety-split, Oracle's initial reference implementation of the NC. The idea was that, in the future, no one would have increasingly powerful computers in their homes. Instead, they would use machines that were little more than terminals on steroids, using the power of the web to do their work, surf the internet (that's what we called it in those days) and play games.
And, we were going to do all this on dial-up.
The NetStation was Acorn's commercial implementation. Intended as a set-top box* the product scarcely even got off the ground, largely because no one wanted to "surf" the internet over dial-up, or on the TV in their living room using an infra-red controller.
Acorn tried messing about with "video on demand" trials in the Cambridge area in a bid to try and create a market that would actually buy its products, but while it was fiddle-faddling around with these unworkable ideas the core market for its PCs dried up and the company disappeared in a puff of ARM code in 1998.
* even in the days of the cathode-ray tube, no-one ever put anything more than a few dinky ornaments on top of their TVs
Pictured: A rare image of a *used* Acorn NetStation. Image via Wikipedia
[Next: Number five, the Philips G7000]
Top-10 worst computers
There's been some truly ghastly rubbish made since Colossus cracked its first wartime code
5. Philips Videopac G7000
Okay, okay. Strictly speaking the G7000 is a ghastly games console - Europe's answer to the Atari 2600. However, it has an appalling membrane keyboard and, with the purchase of a cartridge called Computer Intro!, you could even program it. That classifies it as a computer in our book and, more importantly, as bad a computer as it was a games machine.
It squeaked out onto the market in December 1978. At its heart was an Intel 8048 microcontroller running at 1.8MHz, a chip that had also powered a series of Korg and Roland music synthesisers at the time. The keyboard was intended for use with "educational games".
Superficially, the graphics ought to have been pretty good for the time. It had a custom Intel 8244/5 integrated circuit offering 160 by 200 resolution, a 16-colour palette and even sprites - but too little memory to do much useful.
Even the fanboy(s) responsible for the system's wikipedia page describe the graphics as its "weakest point" which, for what is predominantly a games machine, is a fairly glaring and obvious weakness.
Pictured: The Philips G7000 displaying one of its mundane exciting games! Image via Wikipedia
[Next: Number four, the Amstrad PC2000 series]
Top-10 worst computers
There's been some truly ghastly rubbish made since Colossus cracked its first wartime code
4. Amstrad PC2000 Series
On the surface, these were perfectly fine, well-specced machines at a good price. This, however, was the machine that effectively ended Amstrad's days as a fast-growing, free-wheeling consumer electronics/PC/ satellite dish/ whatever-Lord-Sugar-wanted-to-make technology company.
Lord Sugar's Amstrad operation didn't hang around and check every component to the nth degree, as Lord Sugar's biography, What You See is What You Get, admits. Instead, when Amstrad took delivery of a batch of disk drives that had, unbeknown to them, been rejected by Tandy, who tested stuff first, they just bunged 'em in to the latest range of IBM compatibles, trusting that Seagate and Western Digital were honest, upstanding corporate citizens.
Initially, everything was hunky-dory. But then the customer complaints started tumbling in: the disk drives were failing in ever-increasing numbers. The company responded with a recall to switch the home-made disk controllers, which Amstrad had designed and made itself to cut a few pennies in cost, but which Seagate and Western Digital swore blind were the cause of the problem.
New standard disk controllers were purchased, a production line at Amstrad's factory in Shoeburyness was hurriedly converted, the PCs recalled, and the disk controllers swapped before the machine was relaunched. Yet the disk drives continued conking out at an alarming rate.
By the time Amstrad realised that the disk drives themselves were the problem, the company's reputation as a PC maker had been shot to pieces.
"The sad thing about this whole situation was that we did not have the engineering capability within Amstrad to look at this situation independently. We'd made the assumption that Seagate and Western Digital knew what they were talking about," Lord Sugar dolefully recounts in his biography, What You See is What You Get.
After the furore died down, Amstrad was never the same - others had muscled in on its low-cost PC territory, including Dell, which Lord Sugar had loftily dismissed just a few years earlier.
Pictured: A much-loved Amstrad PC2286. Image via computers.popcorn.cx]
[Next: The three worst computers of all time... and the ones that got away]
Top-10 worst computers
There's been some truly ghastly rubbish made since Colossus cracked its first wartime code
3. Mattel Aquarius
Toymaker Mattel scored a big hit with its Intellivision games consoles, which game-snobs tended to prefer over the more popular Atari 2600. So, why wouldn't the maker of Barbie and He-Man action figures be interested in its own entrant in the nascent home computer market?
The Aquarius, designed for Mattel by Hong Kong electronics company Radofin, was the result. Mattel's aim seems to have been to make a machine that could be purchased reasonably cheaply, but which would cost a small fortune to add bits to in order to do anything useful with it. For example, before you could connect game pads, expand the memory or improve the sound, you had to buy an expensive "Mini-Expander" peripheral.
While it had a standard Zilog Z80A for its £150 mark-up, the four kilobytes of memory were plainly inadequate, and could only be expanded to an also-inadequate 20 kilobytes. The graphics were little better than teletext, too.
It was well-made, but one basic aspect of the design helped elevate this machine all the way to number three - the reset key. Seriously, which brain surgeon thought it would be a great idea to put a cold reset button right next - and we mean, right next - to the number one key, which could instantly reset the machine without so much as a warning?
Announced in 1982 and released in June 1983, Mattel ordered production stopped four months later due to poor sales. It subsequently paid Radofin to take the thing away.
Pictured: A shiny, new Mattel Aquarius. Note the "reset" button. Image via Wikipedia
2. Apple III
Before Steve Jobs perfected the art of walking on water, the company he co-founded produced its fair share of dud devices. These include, most notably, the Power Mac G4 Cube (one of Jonathan Ive's fancy designs) with the plastic ("acrylic") case that cracked, and the under-powered and eye-wateringly priced Lisa. However, 1980's Apple III arguably beats these, partly on account of its combination of high price and basic obsolescence, almost as soon as it was launched.
After all, for around three grand - the price, at the time, of an Austin Metro - you'd expect something more than a machine with a 1.8MHz 6502A microprocessor, even if it did have a nice keyboard, a built-in floppy disk drive and 128 kilobytes of memory, which was a fair bit at the time.
However, it was some of the spectacularly bad design decisions that Jobs himself insisted upon that propels this under-powered computer straight in at number two.
Jobs decided that it shouldn't have a cooling fan because he considered them "too noisy and inelegant", while the power supply also had no ventilation. On top of that, he demanded that the engineers fit everything into a case that was simply too small for the components.
The result? The machine overheated to such an extent that the case warped, and the microprocessor and other chips within developed the habit of popping out of their sockets.
Belatedly, Jobs had the machine redesigned and relaunched, but by then businesses were buying IBM PCs instead.
Pictured: A perfectly formed Apple III. Image via Wikipedia
1. IBM PCjr
Don't worry, Lord Sugar, bigger companies than yours have made a total Horlicks of launching a new computer. And they didn't come any bigger back in 1984 than IBM when this positively nasty machine, the PC Junior or PCjr, as IBM's marketing machine would have it, was launched.
But first, a little history: Soon after releasing the, frankly, knocked-together IBM PC back in 1981, lots of clever people (mostly patent lawyers) quickly realised that it was all made from standard parts, except for the BIOS chip, which made all the otherwise standard hardware play nicely together. Once this had been reversed engineered, most notably by Compaq, the IBM PC simply became known as “the PC”.
In a bid to undo this catastrophic error, IBM made a number of efforts to re-capture the market, most notably with the March 1984 release of the PCjr. Officially, this was intended for the home market. But unofficially, it was also intended to provide a bit of price competition from Big Blue to the upstart makers of lower-priced “PC compatibles”.
People would, of course, much prefer to buy a machine with an “IBM” badge on it than a “Dell” or a “Compaq”, wouldn't they?
Actually no. Little did IBM realise that the PC ship had already sailed and few people were interested in a machine that InfoWorld writer John Clapp described as "a pathetic, crippled computer" that was still expensive compared to the home computers it was competing against.
In a bid to provide the kind of gimmick that would impress people who shopped in department stores, IBM bundled-in a wireless keyboard: An infra-red, chiclet-style wireless keyboard that required a clear line of sight and a lot of patience. Seriously, infra-red!
But perhaps worst of all, it wasn't even 100 per cent PC-compatible, which meant that running software on it became something of a lottery. Some 60 per cent of the applications for the IBM PC simply wouldn't run on the PCjr, although users largely had to find out themselves via a process of trial-and-error.
Launched in March 1984, the machine was already in trouble by the summer of that year. Impressively, IBM persisted with the PCjr for three years in a bid to shift an inventory of up to 400,000 units, before having another futile go at taking back the PC market with the PS/2 in 1987, which also tanked.
Have we missed anything even more awful than these? Did you buy any of these machines? Tell us about it and/or flame the author below.
Pictured: The IBM PCjr and the worst computer keyboard ever designed. Image via Wikipedia
The ones that got away...
Amstrad e-mailer
Okay, strictly speaking, this is a phone with some limited email messaging capabilities. However, following the precedent set by the Philips G-7000, we're including this, too, as it also has a keyboard, and later models could download and play Sinclair Spectrum games, only 15 or so years after they were first released.
Widely ridiculed at launch, Lord Sugar persisted with the device through several iterations, presumably because the pay-as-you-use model meant that Amstrad stood to make a tidy fortune, if only people would buy more of them. They didn't. The last device, the E3 Superphone, was discontinued in the mid-2000s, and the email service shut down in 2011.
Atari 65XE
A brand-new eight-bit home computer, even one offering backwards compatibility with Atari 2600 games, was always going to struggle in 1985. It had no chance, however, with its terrible reliability.
Atari Falcon
Not the first into 32-bit home computing – Acorn got there first with the Archimedes range - but a machine running a Motorola 68030 CPU was not to be sniffed at. Unless it was coupled with a 16-bit data bus that effectively crippled the whole thing. Released in 1992, the machine was cancelled in 1993.
Apple Lisa
Horribly over-priced and under-powered but it did, at least, indicate the way forward for computers in terms of the graphical user interface.
Coleco Adam
A nice idea. A home computer offering compatibility with Colecovision's arcade-standard games. It was expensive, however, and with the power supply built into the printer when the printer went wrong, the whole thing was rendered unusable. Oh yes, and an electromagnetic surge on power-up that could wipe tapes and disks if you'd left them in.
Commodore 16
The Commodore 64 was a pricey, if successful and popular home computer that offered good graphics and sound (and, hence, games) alongside a terrible implementation of Basic. However, cutting the amount of memory by three-quarters in order to offer a Commodore 64 which couldn't run most of the Commodore 64's software was a very bad idea. Discontinued within a year.
Commodore Plus/4
The Plus/4 was a home computer aimed at serious computers. As such, it had an office-suite of software built-in – word processor, spreadsheet and a database altogether in one handy package. Unfortunately, home computer users wanted good graphics, great sound and exciting games – all the things that the Plus/4 didn't have.
Jupiter Ace
We may have to go into hiding for including this short-lived machine – but a cheap home computer with black and white graphics, which used Forth as its native language rather than Basic, was never going to cut much ice as “my first computer”.
IBM PS/2
1984's PC Junior fiasco, remarkably, didn't put IBM off. After giving away the PC market back in 1980, 1987's PS/2 was going to win it back. This would be a proper, proprietary IBM that everyone would want, which would thereby win back the whole PC market for IBM. Unfortunately for IBM, no one wanted its proprietary computers any more and buyers baulked at IBM's cynicism.
Sinclair QL
Months late and, when it did ship, it required users to run it with a “dongle” hanging out of the back. At £399, it was neither a home computer, nor a business computer – especially with Sir Clive Sinclair's fixation with chiclet-style keyboards.