I can remember seeing a Sinclair Spectrum running a CNC milling machine back in the 1980's and they were as common in factories as they were in the home.
Until the PC came the Sinclair Spectrum was the world's biggest selling computer (including clones) globally. When the IBM PC came out the Daily Mail newspaper predicted that it was "The next "Sinclair Spectrum" and would prove to be as popular for both home, office and factory"....
A friend had a Comodore 64 with disc drive and demonstrated that the tape loading was faster than the disc drive.
I've had the Spectrum 48K (4 Mhz.), Spectrum + (4 Mhz.), Spectrum 128K (4 Mhz.), Spectrum 128K +2 (6 Mhz.) and Spectrum +3 (8 Mhz.).
My Spectrum +3 was hooked up to a 5.25" 1.2 M.Byte disc drive and a 10 M.Byte IBM MFM disc drive (though only 8.5 M.byte could be formatted and used). The standard 3" single side floppy was replaced by a 3" double sided floppy.
The Spectrum was always the king of the 8 bit micro computers back in the 1980's due to its speed and easy adaptability to user modifications, etc.
Until I had my first PC I used to also write PC assembler, Pascal and C programmes on the Spectrum +3.
I'm tempted to rummage in the loft and wallow in some nostalgic gaming.
Computers were so much faster in those days (no waiting for Windows to start up).