Did you have a home computer in the 1980s?

[wanderings]

We had a ZX81 which attached to the TV (I was also a child of the 80s): it could do programming and graphics. I quickly got better at using it than my parents, but it was not much good for word processing. It really helped me with maths.

Later we had an Amstrad PCW which was great for word processing, and programming (I loved using Logo to draw pictures), but not games. My mum didn't embrace the idea of using it to plan or draft a piece of writing - she would not type a word until she had it finalised on paper. It lasted a few years before it went wrong too often. I learned to type on it; my mum got me a book about how to touch type, and I got quite speedy with it. The manual for this computer was literally an inch thick (and on really thin paper), and written in a very longhand style - how things have changed!

Frak! How I loved that game.

We had a BBC, which I painstakingly saved up for for ages. I still remember the joy when we finally got a disk drive (double-sided, double-density!)

I played Chuckie Egg endlessly, and Repton 2. The best game ever, though, was Citadel, a huge platform adventure, in which you could choose to be a boy (a lump of pixels) or a girl (a lump or pixels with a pony tail).

I had a ZX81, in fact I’ve still got it somewhere. It never worked though, it kept crashing. Then I had a Commodore 64. I taught myself some basic programming from ‘Input’ magazine, did anyone else have that? It also started my love for video games, I had Frantic Freddie, Zim Sala Bim, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, aah the memories! I saved up and bought a second hand Atari game console. I later had an Amiga and got addicted to Rainbow Islands! After that I had a home computer in the early 90s when I went to university. Finally bought a PC with internet access around 2000.

My first computer was an Amstrad 464 with the tape deck built onto the side of the keyboard but I only ever played games on it.

A bit later, somewhere between 1988 and 1992 I worked for a university and had access to all sorts of computer equipment. I remember typing a report at home one evening and one of my partners’ friends asking “what’s that?”
“It’s called a laptop computer”
“I’ve never seen one of them before.”

I remember it had no internal hard drive!
It had a three disk system. I’d have to boot it up with an MS DOS disk (no Windows). Then take that out and put in a disk for MS Word. Type my document then put in another disk to save my file.

What a pallaver!

We had an amstrad with a tape drive which you had to wait about half an hour for the game to load up. We played Roland on the ropes and ‘oh mummy’-I can still hum the music!
My grandad bought us a PC in the 90s and we were very lucky to have a whole gigabyte of RAM! We had cd Roms of Encarta and dangerous animals!

If you've not already seen it, some of you may enjoy Halt and Catch Fire ... which wiki describes as a 'Period drama'. We're about half way through it and in places it's a bit of a blast from the past.

We had a ZX81, I used to get frustrated at how slow it was. There was a massive lag between typing something and it doing anything on screen.

Then I had a C16+4, a shit version of theC64, my dad also bought a Betamax so not the greatest at choosing technology.

It was still great, I loved the games and learned some basic programming.

@ErrolTheDragon Halt and Catch Fire is brilliant. It deserves to be much better known than it is.

I had an amstrad cpc464 in the eighties, by the nineties dh and I got together and we had a bbc model b (still got that) and an amiga (still got that as well!)
When ds was little we built a pc and I have some cracking photos of my now 27 year old IT manager sat in front of windows 95 playing MS Golf.

When the kids were little and we couldn't afford to go out we'd stay up all night playing lemmings 😂

Yes we had computers early 80's it always surprises me the some now don't think it was a thing until so much later

The Repton games for the bbc, they are now available on iPads 😁

Yep, had a ZX81, Spectrum, C64 (mistake!), Amstrad CPC6128 and after that a variety of PCs.

I was never much of a games player, but me and a friend were known as geeks back then and wrote some games for the Amstrad that were published.

I made programming my career and have been doing that along with a variety of other IT related things for over 30 years as a job now.

Yes. Commodore Vic 20 ( the tape for frogger and Rogue used to take ages to load) then an Amstrad 1512 with games like Arkanoid, and Digger....

Spectrum 48k. Many happy hours playing Jet Set Willy, Attic Attack and getting hopelessly stuck playing The Hobbit!

We had one of those table tennis games, then a Spectrum, then the Amstrad PCW. My dad worked in computers and I did computer studies O level. Dad used to bring home piles of used punch cards from work for us to draw on and play with. At school they had Commodore 64s but only the 6th form were allowed to use them. We had to write our programs out on special sheets of paper to be taken to the local university and processed on their mainframe. I've always used them in the workplaces since the late 80s (in the early years mostly as terminals to mainframes, the occasional PC controlling a piece of equipment) but didn't have a PC of my own until about ten years later. I remember there being a plotter at my first job, it was fascinating.

We had to write our programs out on special sheets of paper to be taken to the local university and processed on their mainframe.

God, coding sheets!! I'd forgotten about them.

Yes from the mid 80s we had a zx81 and then a BBC.
My mum had worked on early computer technology as far back as the 1960s and started my interest when I was in my early teens, I studied what was then called computer science at school.
Then from the start of my career in the late 80s I have always used a computer and had something at home. However I didn’t go into programming but business management

We had an Amstrad 6128 - the one with a disc drive - in the mid 80s, and then bought our first pentium pc in 1997.

IBM PC from 1984 into the early 90s. I can hear the sound of the daisy wheel printer like yesterday (I thought I was pretty cool printing out my essays on it).
All of those DOS commands! All of those floppy discs!
We had a separate Atari console but on the PC, I played some brilliant PC games: Kings Quest IV- The Perils of Rosella was the bomb and my absolutel favourite! I'd still play that game today if I could`1. PC games came in boxes of like 8 floppy discs! I was a serious gamer back then. I spent as much time gaming as any current day teen would.

Sorry- cat walked across my keyboard and left evidence in my last post.

We didn't have one when I was born in 1988 - my mum was still using a typewriter for work!

But we had one when I started school so probably around 1993 or so? Very basic and no internet but we had floppy disc games and word pad - I thought it was dead fancy I used to love playing the SEGA Aladdin game on there even though I never got past level five!

We got internet in 2000 - dial up only for a while then broadband in around 2002.

ZXspectrum +2
The noise when the game was loading! And it took ages!
My cousin had the same computer so we used to copy the tapes and play each others games.
First proper computer not till late 90's

The Apollo guidance computer had just 2048 words (marginally over 4k) of memory - 4 or 8 times less than the BBC Model A and B.

We had a bbc model b. Played some real basic games which were loaded on cassettes. One game I remember had no graphics at all, was just text and you had to try and find something in a castle and then get out. So you would type what you wanted to do and normally a spider would then kill you.

Chuckie Egg was a great game.

Then we got a Commadore 64. Everything still took about an hour to load but had some great games. Summer Olympics, Winter Olympics. Outrunner? Some great martial art fighting games. You can buy some sort of modern commadore 64 with a load of the old games now.

We had a Commodore 64 and then an Amiga 500 mainly for games. My husband now has a vintage games room set up with every console you can think of and the walls are lined with games!
In the early 90’s my Dad had a huge IBM set up in his office. I was always annoyed that I wasn’t allowed to play on it. He was writing a textbook on carbon fibres and once he completed the book he skipped the whole thing and normally he never throws anything away!

We got a windows enabled PC very early on, my friends were very jealous when we had a second phone line installed upstairs so that we could connect to the internet without fuss.

We had an Amstrad, it had a black and white monitor and was amazing. My eldest brother who went on to work in IT programmed it to play a song if you put in some bizarre command. There were two games on it that I loved, Digger and some sort of olympics thing. I remember being so proud and then my friend got one, but they got the colour monitor. Everything looked so much fancier. I kind of went off it then. In my defence I was very young!