Dell Optiplex 960 seems common here in Sweden, the scrappers/recyclers have loads of them.
I recently saved one.

I guess the support and service deal was for 5 or 6 years so now they all get replaced.

I've seen lots of older compaq stuff; keyboards, speakers, towers, etc.

sliderider wrote:

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer was very popular in Britain and then cloned like mad behind the Iron Curtain. It was sold elsewhere, but never sold in the numbers like they did in the UK and Eastern Europe.

Matth79 wrote:

The peculiarly British - BBC Micro and the Acorn Archimedes - and the Amstrads, mind you, the fan on the Amstrad 2386 was a disgrace!

I read somewhere that the BBC Micro actually had the most powerful Basic language of any 8-bit computer in the world. You could write machine language subroutines from a built in compiler and then access them from your Basic program with special commands added just for that purpose. Good for when you needed more speed or low level access to the hardware to do things that Basic alone couldn't. You could do these things with other Basic variants but not without putting a lot more work into it. BBC Basic made it so much simpler.

Yes. even the earlier Acorn atom had a built-in 6502 assembler, but it's BASIC was rudimentary (integer only, unless you added the floating point ROM).

BBC Basic added named Functions and Procedures, and allowed recursion.

There was one quirk in their BASIC - unlike some others, they did not properly clean up an abandoned FOR-NEXT loop, resulting in an eventual out of memory crash unless you declared an outer "FOR kick = 0 to 0" loop, then you could blow away any inner loops by "NEXT kick".

It also supported REPEAT UNTIL and WHILE DO loops - it was the bastard child of BASIC & PASCAL

Matth79 wrote:

The peculiarly British - BBC Micro and the Acorn Archimedes - and the Amstrads, mind you, the fan on the Amstrad 2386 was a disgrace!

Amstrad (under the Schneider brand) where quite common in Germany.
Our school had several CPC machines, not sure how many were owned privately.
We had a PC1640 (cool XT for gaming), I knew two owners of PC1512. Later Schneider machines were own constructions independent from Amstrad, so I suppose later Amstrad machines were not common in Germany, while Schneider machines still sold (eg. Schneider Euro PC which is probably uncommon everywhere else).

In the early 80s computers were quite regional. Apple IIs were dominant in the west coast, Atari 800 in the mountain states, and Commodore on the east coast. Almost no one in New York had an Atari, and no one in Utah had a Commodore.

This started again with mail order computers in the nineties. In the upper midwest and New England, including New York, and New Jersey, Gateway 2000 was dominant. Micron was dominant in the mountain states, and northwest, and Dell in the south. This would be true from about 1993 until 1998 when Dell completely took over.

AST was dominant in the west until they acquired Tandy Corporation (Radio Shack) computer business in 1994 and went to sh***.

Regionally common hardware in The Netherlands during the 80's and 90's:

- Philips P2000T home computer (1981-1984)
- Philips MSX computer series (1985-1987)
- Philips x86 pc's (1987-1992ish)
- Tulip x86 pc's (1985-1998ish)

Apart from these, pretty much everything from the U.S., U.K., Europe and Taiwan(ese pc clones) was available over here. I think that the Commodore 64 was very popular over here (probably more sold than all Philips MSX systems combined, looking at what's left these days). Most (advanced) Japanese computers were not sold in The Netherlands, apart from some MSX models, some Sharp systems (including the early MZ-80K) and a couple portables (Canon, Casio, Epson, NEC). Furthermore some MSX computers available in for example France or Spain were not available in The Netherlands, most MSX computers sold over here are from Philips and to a much lesser degree from Sony.

In the corporate world IBM and COMPAQ were extremely dominant (like probably everywhere else in the western world).