My family had one for as long as I can remember, my dad got an apple in the mid 90s and I got his old PC (486er with Win 3.1 if I remember correctly) for my room (must have been 95 or 96). I knew a bunch of people in my street that had one, but it was still pretty rare overall.
Sweden had a special model made for it’s schools, the almighty COMPIS computer. The downside was that it ran the CP/M operating system, which wasn’t compatible with the IBM PC’s that were emerging as the world standard at the time, and at home people had Commodore 64’s and Amigas.
It wasn’t common, but we always had one due to my dad’s job. I used to play games on it – Arkanoid, Alley cat, Sokoban, Prince of Persia, Space Invaders, Grand Prix Circuit, Tetris, Lode Runner…
Lots of games (Leisure Suit Larry FTW), making amateur posters using The Print Shop, inventory control, sales records, even lightweight CAD. And of course there were the bulletin boards.
I could play International Karate and The Last Ninja on my Commodore 64. I guess my first experiences with a DOS PC was a few years later, and initially that was mostly for word processing and spending several minutes downloading just a single raunchy low resolution picture based on one line text descriptions on a BBS. And playing Wolfenstein 3D.
(Might have jumped into the early 90s with the last couple of activities.)
It had the MOS 6502 in the beginning and the Intel i486 in the end if the decade, so it could do everything a modern computer can, but on the speed of quite literally any electronically controlled appliance you may have, maybe even a bit slower, depending on your appliance’s controls.
Edit: Something like your dishwasher’s or washing machine’s control runs a similarly capable or even more capable CPU.
During the 80s computers moved from a few specialized to being a tool a good amount of people could use. In the early 80s youvwould need to do programming and learn codes in order to use the computers. In late 80s you got the first generation of word processors, spread sheets etc.
The only thing I remember having done on a computer in the 80s was flying around with planes in ms fight simulator on our 286 or painting “images” in paint.
Other than that I didn’t do much.
I was around 3 years old and MS-DOS wasn’t the ideal OS for a child of that age.
I think my dad also had a jump’n’ run game called “comic” which was definitely from the 80s, but I only discovered it in the early 90s, so that’s out of the scope of the question
in the 1980’s – late 80’s – we had a radio program and the person would play the computer program on air ( as a sound) that we would record by a tape reacorder and that would be a computer program that could be read by a ( home made) computer – called Galaksija.
Living in partially closed communist country enabled us to develop to some extent our own PC production as well as those “diy” “micro-computers” ( that’s what they were called).
However my first computer was a ZX Spectrum.
Basically – one could play crude games and do programing.
In the 1990’s things exploded with ever more games and programs…
I had a Mac in the late 80s until late 90s, before Internet. My parents first had Internet in 1993 but it took several years before we actually used it in a way that resemble today’s usage.
I remember using ClarisWorks quite a bit to create all sorts of documents (including covers for VHS tapes, summary for audio tapes, birthday cards,…), HyperCard for various simple programs (some of which I actually sold as sharewares), Deluxe Music Construction Set to typeset music sheets and play on a MIDI piano (I used to play the cello and had the computer play the piano part), balance budget with Tous comptes faits, we used a number of sharewares for stuff like address book. There was also encyclopedia on CD ROM. Later on, in my later teen years, I learned C with MPW and the Macintosh Toolbox, tinkered with ResEdit, etc.
And in addition to that, there were numerous small games, and we had a few commercial games (Myst, Starfleet Academy, and a few others but I don’t remember the names…).
We bought magazines every month, and they had a floppy disk (originally) and later a CD ROM, with a lot of freewares and sharewares, as well as custom wallpapers, icon sets, etc.
The fun part was to send them my own program to get them published there.
My friend designed paper models (in this case cars/vans/trucks) on an Amstrad CPC 6128 with Oxford PAO while I still drawing them on paper with my brother’s Rotring pens (so that I could photocopy them).
On a standard home computer like a C64 you could do basic office tasks, play games, download pirated games, play online games and print documents with an attached printer.
Basically the same as now minus the videos, photos and music in hi quality.
We figured out how to talk to the boys school…I went to all girls catholic school…we would sort out who was going to “school disco” and organised to meet up!!🤣
Type text assignments and for economy lessons there were software programs we had to learn. Bookkeeping business software. i hated it. Playing pacman or skirun was more fun.
My Dad was a teacher in a secondary school – staff could sign a computer out to take home for the weekend. Some of this blends into the early 90s too.
The UK had quite a push tor computers in schools in the 1980s. Of the three types of computer available at the school:
BBC Model ‘B’ (Acorn) – I don’t remember him bringing one home as there were mainly educational games for them, and a focus on programming in the built-in BASIC interpreter.
The Acorn Archimedes (A3000 model) was my favourite – mainly because the teachers or techies Dad worked with had amassed a large amount of copies of games for it!
It was a colour system with a full GUI, there were a few paint apps but also games like Lemmings, a racing game called E-Type, and several flight sims – Interdictor, Mig-29, and Chocks Away. Also a shoot-em-up called SWIV, Pacmania, and a game called ‘Lander’ which was a demo of Zarch.
Even when we got the first of a few Apple Macs at home like an LC III you were limited to running business apps like Claris Works, which I typed a lot of school work on in the mid 90s. For research you’d need a machine with a CD-ROM drive and an encyclopaedia like Encarta.
We didn’t get internet access at home until maybe the very late 90s, on a PC with an early “pay as you go” ISP called Freeserve – there was no monthly subscription.
With a BBC MIcro you could buy a modem and hack into the Joint Academic Network (JANET) to play the world’s first online multiuser adventure game, MUD, which was developed in 1980 at Essex university.
Broadly speaking, you could do anything on them in the 80s that you can do now in the 2020s, just more expensively and without high resolution screens. Even networking was available, in the form of bulletin boards and lots and lots of incompatible systems (such as CP/NET) that have all happily died.
Games. Programming. (Starting with BASIC, then 6502 assembly, then Pascal in school, then C on Amiga.) School assignments (Word Processing) in the late 80s.
Around 1987 or 1988, one of my friends had an Atari 65xe, it was used to play games, but tapes were very slow to load games. I remember a golf game, a two player tenis game and River Raid.
Spectrum z80 all the way… Back to school and how to be a complete bastard were 2 of my favourite games. There used to be magazines that gave you code and you could build and compile games on it.
I got a Commodore 64, it was my pride and joy. Did some basic Basic programming, and quickly learned about pirating games for the datasette. Burning Rubber was my favourite 🙂
We had games on our computers at school in the 80s.
To start with there were 2 computers and it was a very special day when you got to play on it. I have vague memories of a text based game involving dragons and magic and knowing how to spell.
Then I remember being upgraded to new ones with a 3.5 inch floppy disk that wasn’t floppy any more. And there was a mouse, so we had to learn how to use a mouse as none of us had used one before. There was one computer per classroom so we had some kind of rota of who got to use it when. This would have been in 1990 that we had the upgrade.
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My family had one for as long as I can remember, my dad got an apple in the mid 90s and I got his old PC (486er with Win 3.1 if I remember correctly) for my room (must have been 95 or 96). I knew a bunch of people in my street that had one, but it was still pretty rare overall.
We wrote school assignments, balanced our budget in excel and played video games like Lode Runner and Risk.
Sweden had a special model made for it’s schools, the almighty COMPIS computer. The downside was that it ran the CP/M operating system, which wasn’t compatible with the IBM PC’s that were emerging as the world standard at the time, and at home people had Commodore 64’s and Amigas.
It wasn’t common, but we always had one due to my dad’s job. I used to play games on it – Arkanoid, Alley cat, Sokoban, Prince of Persia, Space Invaders, Grand Prix Circuit, Tetris, Lode Runner…
Lots of games (Leisure Suit Larry FTW), making amateur posters using The Print Shop, inventory control, sales records, even lightweight CAD. And of course there were the bulletin boards.
I could play International Karate and The Last Ninja on my Commodore 64. I guess my first experiences with a DOS PC was a few years later, and initially that was mostly for word processing and spending several minutes downloading just a single raunchy low resolution picture based on one line text descriptions on a BBS. And playing Wolfenstein 3D.
(Might have jumped into the early 90s with the last couple of activities.)
It had the MOS 6502 in the beginning and the Intel i486 in the end if the decade, so it could do everything a modern computer can, but on the speed of quite literally any electronically controlled appliance you may have, maybe even a bit slower, depending on your appliance’s controls.
Edit: Something like your dishwasher’s or washing machine’s control runs a similarly capable or even more capable CPU.
During the 80s computers moved from a few specialized to being a tool a good amount of people could use. In the early 80s youvwould need to do programming and learn codes in order to use the computers. In late 80s you got the first generation of word processors, spread sheets etc.
The only thing I remember having done on a computer in the 80s was flying around with planes in ms fight simulator on our 286 or painting “images” in paint.
Other than that I didn’t do much.
I was around 3 years old and MS-DOS wasn’t the ideal OS for a child of that age.
I think my dad also had a jump’n’ run game called “comic” which was definitely from the 80s, but I only discovered it in the early 90s, so that’s out of the scope of the question
in the 1980’s – late 80’s – we had a radio program and the person would play the computer program on air ( as a sound) that we would record by a tape reacorder and that would be a computer program that could be read by a ( home made) computer – called Galaksija.
Living in partially closed communist country enabled us to develop to some extent our own PC production as well as those “diy” “micro-computers” ( that’s what they were called).
However my first computer was a ZX Spectrum.
Basically – one could play crude games and do programing.
In the 1990’s things exploded with ever more games and programs…
I had a Mac in the late 80s until late 90s, before Internet. My parents first had Internet in 1993 but it took several years before we actually used it in a way that resemble today’s usage.
I remember using ClarisWorks quite a bit to create all sorts of documents (including covers for VHS tapes, summary for audio tapes, birthday cards,…), HyperCard for various simple programs (some of which I actually sold as sharewares), Deluxe Music Construction Set to typeset music sheets and play on a MIDI piano (I used to play the cello and had the computer play the piano part), balance budget with Tous comptes faits, we used a number of sharewares for stuff like address book. There was also encyclopedia on CD ROM. Later on, in my later teen years, I learned C with MPW and the Macintosh Toolbox, tinkered with ResEdit, etc.
And in addition to that, there were numerous small games, and we had a few commercial games (Myst, Starfleet Academy, and a few others but I don’t remember the names…).
We bought magazines every month, and they had a floppy disk (originally) and later a CD ROM, with a lot of freewares and sharewares, as well as custom wallpapers, icon sets, etc.
The fun part was to send them my own program to get them published there.
My friend designed paper models (in this case cars/vans/trucks) on an Amstrad CPC 6128 with Oxford PAO while I still drawing them on paper with my brother’s Rotring pens (so that I could photocopy them).
On a standard home computer like a C64 you could do basic office tasks, play games, download pirated games, play online games and print documents with an attached printer.
Basically the same as now minus the videos, photos and music in hi quality.
We figured out how to talk to the boys school…I went to all girls catholic school…we would sort out who was going to “school disco” and organised to meet up!!🤣
Type text assignments and for economy lessons there were software programs we had to learn. Bookkeeping business software. i hated it. Playing pacman or skirun was more fun.
I was playing with Basic on my brother‘s c64, thought it was fun having my name run across the screen.
My Dad was a teacher in a secondary school – staff could sign a computer out to take home for the weekend. Some of this blends into the early 90s too.
The UK had quite a push tor computers in schools in the 1980s. Of the three types of computer available at the school:
BBC Model ‘B’ (Acorn) – I don’t remember him bringing one home as there were mainly educational games for them, and a focus on programming in the built-in BASIC interpreter.
Apple Macs like the Plus or Classic had more business or work-focused software, but there were a few games, I remember there were copies of Shufflepuck Cafe, Crystal Quest and Dark Castle kicking about.
The Acorn Archimedes (A3000 model) was my favourite – mainly because the teachers or techies Dad worked with had amassed a large amount of copies of games for it!
It was a colour system with a full GUI, there were a few paint apps but also games like Lemmings, a racing game called E-Type, and several flight sims – Interdictor, Mig-29, and Chocks Away. Also a shoot-em-up called SWIV, Pacmania, and a game called ‘Lander’ which was a demo of Zarch.
Even when we got the first of a few Apple Macs at home like an LC III you were limited to running business apps like Claris Works, which I typed a lot of school work on in the mid 90s. For research you’d need a machine with a CD-ROM drive and an encyclopaedia like Encarta.
We didn’t get internet access at home until maybe the very late 90s, on a PC with an early “pay as you go” ISP called Freeserve – there was no monthly subscription.
With a BBC MIcro you could buy a modem and hack into the Joint Academic Network (JANET) to play the world’s first online multiuser adventure game, MUD, which was developed in 1980 at Essex university.
Broadly speaking, you could do anything on them in the 80s that you can do now in the 2020s, just more expensively and without high resolution screens. Even networking was available, in the form of bulletin boards and lots and lots of incompatible systems (such as CP/NET) that have all happily died.
Games. Programming. (Starting with BASIC, then 6502 assembly, then Pascal in school, then C on Amiga.) School assignments (Word Processing) in the late 80s.
I was a teen and had none.
Friends learned programing in Basic, typed what had to be ryped and also played Atari console level games.
Didn’t have one til 1990s.
Around 1987 or 1988, one of my friends had an Atari 65xe, it was used to play games, but tapes were very slow to load games. I remember a golf game, a two player tenis game and River Raid.
Spectrum z80 all the way… Back to school and how to be a complete bastard were 2 of my favourite games. There used to be magazines that gave you code and you could build and compile games on it.
I got a Commodore 64, it was my pride and joy. Did some basic Basic programming, and quickly learned about pirating games for the datasette. Burning Rubber was my favourite 🙂
We had games on our computers at school in the 80s.
To start with there were 2 computers and it was a very special day when you got to play on it. I have vague memories of a text based game involving dragons and magic and knowing how to spell.
Then I remember being upgraded to new ones with a 3.5 inch floppy disk that wasn’t floppy any more. And there was a mouse, so we had to learn how to use a mouse as none of us had used one before. There was one computer per classroom so we had some kind of rota of who got to use it when. This would have been in 1990 that we had the upgrade.