087 math chip, but Epson did bundle some utility programs that offered decent turnkey functionality for novice users. While not a high performer, the Equity was a reliable and compatible design for half the price of a similarly-configured IBM PC. Epson often promoted sales by bundling one of their printers with it at cost. The Equity I sold well enough to warrant the furtherance of the Equity line with the follow-on Equity II and Equity III.
In 1986 UK home computer maker Amstrad began producing their PC1512PC-compatible for sale in the UK. Later they would market the machine in the USA as the PC6400. In June 1987 an improved model was produced as the PC1640. These machines had fast 8086 CPUs, enhanced CGA graphics, and were feature-laden for their modest prices. They had joystick adapters built into their keyboards and shipped with a licensed version of the Digital Research's GEM, a GUI for the MS-DOS operating system. They became marginal successes in the home market.
In 1987 longtime small computer maker Zenith introduced a low-cost PC they called the EaZy PC.This was positioned as an "appliance" computer much like the original Apple Macintosh: turnkey startup, built-in monochrome video monitor, and lacking expansion slots requiring proprietary add-ons available only from Zenith, but instead with the traditional MS-DOS Command-line interface. The EaZy PC used a turbo NEC V40 CPU (uprated 8088) which was rather slow for its time, but the video monitor did feature 400 pixel vertical resolution. This unique computer failed for the same reasons as did IBM's PCjr: poor performance and expandability, and a price too high for the home market.
Another company that offered low-cost PCs for home use was Leading Edge with their Model M and Model D computers. These were configured like full-featured business PCs yet still could compete in the home market on price because Leading Edge had access to low-cost hardware from their Asian manufacturing partners Mitsubishi with the Model M and Daewoo with the Model D. The LEWP was bundled with the Model D. It was favorably reviewed by the computer press and sold very well.
By the mid-80s the market for inexpensive PCs for use in the home market was expanding at a rate such that the two leaders in the USA, Commodore and Atari, themselves felt compelled to enter the market with their own lines. They were only marginally successful compared to other companies that made only PCs.
Still later prices of white box PC clone computers by various manufacturers became competitive with the higher-end home computers (see below). Throughout the 1980s costs and prices continued to be driven down by: advanced circuit design and manufacturing, multifunction expansion cards, shareware applications such as PC-Talk, PC-Write, and PC-File, greater hardware reliability, and more user-friendly software that demanded less customer support services. The increasing availability of faster processor and memory chips, inexpensive EGA and VGA video cards, sound cards, and joystick adapters also bolstered the viability of PC/DOS computers as alternatives to specially-made computers and game consoles for the home.
From about 1985 the high end of the home computer market began to be dominated by "next generation" home computers using the 16-bit Motorola 68000 chip, which enabled the greatly increased abilities of the Amiga and Atari ST series (in the UK the Sinclair QL was built around the Motorola 68008 with its external 8-bit bus). Graphics resolutions approximately doubled to give roughly NTSC-class resolution, and color palettes increased from dozens to hundreds or thousands of colors available. The Amiga was built with a custom chipset with dedicated graphics and sound coprocessors for high performance video and audio. The Amiga found use as a workstation for motion video, a first for a standalone computer costing far less than dedicated motion-video processing equipment costing many thousands of dollars. Stereo sound became standard for the first time; the Atari ST gained popularity as an affordable alternative fo