[thorin]

Yes, I never saw any Apple in Europe either (specifically UK). On the educational side BBC was king in the UK, so parents who were teachers would prefer the BBC, which had a great version of Elite too and a lot of the text adventures, but not so many action games.

From my memory of getting a Vic 20 then a ZX Spectrum +3 there was a pretty even split of Commodore and Spectrum machines among my friends. There were LOTS of other machines too, Atari, Oric, Amstrad, Tandy (Radio Shack) in the early days.

Although I had a mouse and a drawing program for the Spectrum the computers for creatives in the UK didn't really take off until the Amiga and Atari ST with their awesome sound and graphics packages.

[trm42]

There were Macintoshes here and there at least in Finland where I live. Saw first Mac in 1989 or 90 and did see them here and there but they were not common household items.

C64 was kind of a national computer for the 80s but there were others as well and Macs were used in the DTP and graphics circles a lot and sometimes one could find them in schools as well but as I said, they were quite high end and adult/work oriented compared to the inexpensive home computers like Commodores, Ataris and sometimes even PCs.

Funnily in Finland there were home computer magazines which basically ignored the existence of Macs for most of the time except there was one, seprate Mac magazine. Probably because the advertising segment was targeted to DTP professionals etc.

[pjmlp]

Computer Shopper alternative platforms section was my only way to get to know Archimedes, pity I never got to actually use one.