Those were the days - PCs of old (antiquity?)

In the past, before I had my own PC, I was already very interested in computers, and would go to the library to borrow books about them. Even before owning a PC, I was reading about how to program, how to write simple games that would run on the PCs of those days. This post is dedicated to the PCs of old.

The above is a BBC Micro. It used to be a very popular PC, and had a lot of books written about it. Of course, I never had the chance to look at one before. It plugs in to a normal TV for display, instead of a dedicated monitor. You can connect a floppy drive to it. And back in the days of 300 bps modems, you can connect this to one of those too.
Another often written-about PC was the ZX Spectrum, which runs on a Z80 processor. Like the BBC Micro, you connect it to the TV for video output. And you connect a cassette player to it and use cassette tapes for storage.
Another common PC back in those days was the Commodore 64, commonly known as C64. There were books written about how to program in the C64's BASIC language, which got me interested in programming. Later, I found out that BASIC is a language available in many dialects, and there were differences between that used on the C64 and that used by IBM PCs.

The Atari ST is yet another computer that was mentioned by many books in the past. It was a competitor to the Amiga computers, in that it too had good graphics and sound, and was a good gaming PC during its time. But it eventually lost to the Amiga computers, which had superior graphics and sound.
The TRS-80 from Tandy was also one of the PCs of old. It was very much like a hobby kit, and was targeted at that market. There were books written about how to program using the TRS-80 too, which comes with its own dialect of BASIC. It can be connected to cassette players and floppy drives for storage devices.

I guess these are the PCs of old that I remember reading about. Those were the days, when PCs were still not very popular in the homes of Singapore, and these were the PCs that you read about in books.