By 1993, I could see 'the end is nigh' for my Spectrum +2. It's funny how these things work, because back in the mid 80s, I and many others just assumed Spectrums, Commodores and Amstrads would just be around forever. What with Bill Gates's famous (mis)quote
"640K [RAM] ought to be enough for anybody", we felt home computing could sit as it was, for many decades to come.
But yeah, in the late 80s, the posh kids loved to show off their Atari STs. That really became the flavour of the month but it wasn't too long before the Amiga rose in popularity and then the Amiga and ST kids did a reprise of the C64 vs Speccy war. Didn't last too long as the Amiga eventually won out. If you didn't own an Amiga, you'd at least make mention that you played on one once, in a shop and it was the best thing ever.
Nobody at that time cared about PCs, we were all gamers, PCs were for boring word processing, spreadsheets and business propositions. They were just for dads and businessmen. What little games came out would be in retina-scarring colour schemes of magenta and cyan, ugh, even the Acorn Electron and Dragon 32 were more visually enticing. WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT A PC?
Oh and the consoles of the day (NES and Sega Master System) barely registered a blip in my hometown. Come to think of it, Nintendo's disastrous handling of the NES in Europe (the price points for hardware and cartridges were way way too high) was a marked contrast to their undeniable success in the USA where it was massively prolific.
Around 1991 I noticed the dwindling of Speccy software. (Obviously the dip occurred long before that, but you don't notice these things at the time.) I'd been some games shows at Earls Court and Birmingham's NEC, and the software companies were pretty much all targeting the Amiga and ST. Even the Commodore 64 and 'IBM PC & Compatibles' got more attention than the Speccy. The Speccy magazines were, shall we say, on a 'diet', with Crash turning into a pamphlet.
Now I've read from books on Ocean and US Gold that the Spectrum platforms still shifted software in highly respectable quantities at that time, but with the stunning colour palettes and sound abilities from the two major 16-bit computers, that's what you want as your 'shop window' at trade shows.
I loved Your Sinclair magazine. That kept me going as Spectrum user. When that shut up shop in the late summer of 1993, that's when I felt it was time to move on. The penultimate issue of Your Sinclair had a huge feature on Spectrum emulators. Learning that the Amiga could do a pretty good 'impersonation' of a Speccy made it highly desirable.
I was rather fed up with one guy at college always bragging about his new Amiga 600, looking down on everyone who had a Speccy, Amstrad, Sega Master System, Atari ST... To be fair to him, he was a former Spectrum user who had moved to the Sam Coupe, but as we know, that tanked, so maybe the Amiga, with its credible software library, was a good bet. I was rather miffed with his constant bragging, so I intentionally went to one up him by getting the Amiga 1200 - with a far better colour palette.
(As Amiga users can tell you, the 600 was merely a 500 in a redesigned body with not much hardware improvement. You actually had more compatibility by owning a 500 plus. I guess it's like the Spectrum +2 vs +2A in a way.)
Mind you, one guy at college - the guy who had a pretty damned good perception of computing - warned that both the ST and Amiga would soon be wiped out by the rise of the PC. "Pah, no way", I scoffed. Well, yeah, there's a reason why I'm typing all this on a PC and not an Amiga.
Returning to the subject, I did know others stuck to the Speccy post-1993. Even the Amiga 600 owner would get out his Sam Coupe for a quick bash on Chaos, which we both knew was a fantastic game. There was a young kid along the road from me who had been given his older brother's Speccy as a hand-me-down, and we spent a long time doing tape-to-tape 'back-ups' of our games library around 1993 and 1994.
My Speccy +2 blew up one day in late 1993. I remember the tiny wisp of black smoke that emanated from the power socket. (With hindsight, I assume this was a power surge.) I wasn't tearful about it, I just shrugged my shoulders and muttered that this day was eventually going to come. My friend showed me a second-hand toy shop which sold old computers, and I was amazed that I could pick up a near-mint condition +2A for just £40! That kept me going before I got the Amiga 1200.
Before the internet came along, I'd bought a sound sampler for my Amiga 1200 - the only way to load in real cassettes into 'Spectrum Emulator v2.0'. I also made several train trips up to Leicester, where a unit in the market sold cheap 'public domain' disks for the Amiga and PC. Thanks to SoftSpot, I had around 10 floppy disks containing .z80 snapshots of early Speccy hits (mainly Ultimate and US Gold stuff) that I'd never played before. (Yeah, marked as 'PD' in those days where we naively assumed abandoned titles just fell into public domain on a whim.)
Incidentally, I gave away my +2 to a college friend, a great guy who was from a rather skint background. I got on very well with his family and they were really appreciative of the Speccy. I ensured they got Chaos, which I knew they were huge fans of.
My Amiga 1200 lasted for about four years (yeah, this was hit by ANOTHER POWER SURGE, I really don't learn do I?), so, not as long as my Speccy. I had bought all kinds of add-ons for it, shoved a 1.5GB hard drive inside it, had a second floppy drive purely to watch
Jesus On Es, had a 28.8K modem for the internet (and what I got was primitive even for the time). Saved up a grand over a few months (in which I used my brother's Windows 95 PC) and got my own PC, with a staggering 233MHz Pentium processor.
Oh and one time, I lost everything on the hard drive and the PC was literally unusable. You see, it had been hit by, er, a power surge. Thankfully a repair service was able to replace the motherboard and the hard drive had to be wiped, but I could still use that PC. Oh and I now have power surge protection on almost everything. Phew.