It's said that the tax was for every computing machine but big companies pressured the government to remove it and what the government did was only tax microcomputers and not systems like mainframes and such.
I don't know if the law changed in the last years but here (Spain) it's illegal to sell a computer without a operative system.
Today the most easy option probably is to install Linux but I remember this law was there at year 2000 and at that time Linux was harder to install than FreeDOS.
Many buildings hear use electricity for heating, electricity is cheaper at night. We have heaters that heat some kind of ceramic material and keeps releasing the heat during all the day.
I'm Spanish and I'm finding this very hilarious because that explains a "urban legend" that was about that computer. People said that the Amstrad had a secret chip that only the NSA could use.
Yes secret chips for a foreign government in a offline computer.
Cost is much higher than for the commoditized chips they use. Instead of developing high end SoCs that could run multiple systems, they went for these cheap microcontrollers that controlled a single function or just a few.
To give you an idea of what we are talking about, here’s Infineon’s product page. They are a big automaker supplier, and right in the middle of all this. https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/
Not if you want automobile rated durable chips with higher withstanding voltages etc. On many MCUs, the CPU itself is a minority with a large part being 5V tolerant IO etc.
In the times that I used forums with phpBB and SMF I really liked that I could select the font that I wanted to use, using Comic Sans is a nice way to let people understand that you are using the satire.
The computer with the 72KB was the Amstrad CPC472
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC#CPC472