Reflections on the Home Computer Golden Age

[Megalomaniac]

Much as they feel like the enemy to the home computer world, I guess the Tandy 1000 and Amstrad PC both did well for similar reasons, even though they were at different times and prices in very different markets - the same software as the pros used and as the colleges taught, everything you needed and nothing that you didn't. Did people see that home computers with more power were cheaper, or did they just see that they cost a fraction of the price of a 'real' PC? Perceptions and reality can be different things, alas.

All the same, an ST with monochrome monitor was probably a better business computer than an Amstrad PC (which had CGA rather than the high-resolution monochrome Hercules) - but how would you convince a small businessman with ideas above his station, who wanted to join the big leagues and it was either that or something from the Pong people?

The PC Jr in its original form was dead as a flop by the time the A1000 launched. I can't confirm an exact price and spec for the Tandy 1000 range when the A1000 launched, but it seems that the A1000 was a lot more powerful for maybe slightly cheaper, If you could afford a Tandy 1000 though, and wanted business or home software rather than anything creative, I can understand why the Tandy looked a safer buy than an A1000 in those early days when the Amiga was so badly under-supported. You could say 'Blitter' and 'Copper' and 'Denise' to people, but how would you articulate that it meant better software, with so little software to use as evidence? Did Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry really carry that much cachet outside a creative niche?

[CCCP alert]

Commodore, with their PET heritage and attempt/opportunity to produce their own 8088 (or was it 8086) inside MOS should really have taken the bull by the horns and done what Amstrad etc did and made it happen first at the magic price point of £500/$600 etc. They had the respect from the business community with their PET products already.

It's a money maker, a bit like a car dealer selling cheap simple hatchbacks vs one selling sports cars, they may be inferior products but they always sell and put money in the company account. That's why Amstrad outlived C=, Atari really, they made enough money to see them through the Playstation years that wiped out the £300-400 home computer market as soon as preview footage of Ridge Racer was shown in Autumn 1994 on national TV, it blew people away and so only those who needed a PC got a computer, the games players instead got a PS1 worldwide. Well, that's how it felt back then.

As for things like the Peanut (PC Jr) it was already inferior to the $199.99 C64 in 84, from Uridium to Defender of the Crown and everything inbetween it was useless, and if you really needed a PC to do work at home etc you wouldn't be in the market for a home computer anyway, bit of a naff idea, IBM's hubris gone mad. Even as a kid I knew this watching reports of the failure of the PC Jr on TV.

Off topic....
Perhaps in the EU we were more about specs, even if we didn't understand them. I know at the start of 1983 at school we were all trading specs like Top Trumps cards between various computers. Of course you only got what you/your parents could afford so I never got an Atari 800 but that's what I wanted because I played games on it from 81-82 and I wanted one, it was good enough (but too expensive for our household). Absolute fluke we got a C64 because the VIC-20 stopped working within the exchange or full refund 60 day period so I convinced my Dad to go for the C64 as the tech guy offered (with a £40 further reduction in the cost of the C64 as an incentive not to walk off with a full refund as they were out of stock of the VIC-20).

[Megalomaniac]

I'd say it was PCs, rather than consoles, that killed off home computers. I doubt that most home computers (especially 16-bit ones) were bought with the intention of them only being used for games, even if that was the reality in some cases (I suspect a few of the younger of us exaggerated our serious intentions when we persuaded dad to shell out) By the time the Playstation was being demoed, Commodore had folded and both Atari and Amstrad had moved on, to consoles and PCs respectively. PCs were becoming more mass-market as more homes needed what they could do, people increasingly wanted 'real computers' and standardised packages and architecture, and saw that their kids would be using Windows / IBM / Intel architecture in their education and careers, especially as the Internet took off, in a way that just wasn't true of AGA, GEM or RISC OS. Sad but true. In 1987 the A500 trounced PCs costing several times as much (and would stay competitive long after any 1987 PC had been pensioned off), but in 1992 neither the A1200, Falcon or Archimedes could claim the same. You could get decent PCs for £1000ish by then, and people must have felt that an A1200 + hard drive + monitor + fast RAM was much the same cost. The PC would be less friendly and certainly less characterful, and certainly inferior for arcade-style games or creativity, but it already had software that exploited it, whereas buying an A1200 was a risk in terms of whether it would be fully exploited.

No true home computer existed that could match Ridge Racer, but who's to say that a hypothetical AAA-chipset based A1800 (maybe CD-ROMs, 030 and 4Mb fast RAM?) could not have launched at Christmas 1994 and been capable of matching the Playstation? There would have been a wait for Amiga programmers to learn to match Ridge Racer's tricks using non-dedicated hardware though, and no doubt some attempts would have matched the technical side but had gameplay issues (compare most European-designed Mario or Sonic variants for example).

The PC Jr flopped, but the Tandy 1000s didn't, and some of those were styled like ordinary home computers. America believed in the idea of 'real computers' in the home before Europe was. Specs can be hard to quantify, it can't have been easy to explain how much better an Amiga was for 2D games than an ST, or that a C64 outdid a Spectrum in many areas despite the slow CPU, or that a CPC had specific limitations that weren't obvious from specs you'd think made it the best of both worlds, or why the Enterprise flopped, or why the Playstation outdid 386 PCs for 3D by so far.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

I doubt that most home computers (especially 16-bit ones) were bought with the intention of them only being used for games...

All of my friends who owned a home computer used it mainly for gaming. Some used it also for other things like coding, music, or serious software, but the main reason why people got a home computer (no matter if 8 or 16 bit) was for gaming.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

I'd say it was PCs, rather than consoles, that killed off home computers. I doubt that most home computers (especially 16-bit ones) were bought with the intention of them only being used for games,

"We bought it to help with your homework" may have been a bit of a trope at the time, but I'd say it was definitely true as time went on that home computers were being bought mainly as cheap games machines. Certainly by the time of the Amiga 500 it was not uncommon to buy one purely to keep the kids entertained, as the games were so much cheaper than NES cartridges (and generally looked more impressive).

Of course there was some serious usage, which migrated towards the PC, but for a lot of folk replacing the computer with a games console that just did the one thing they cared about better was the way to go

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Originally Posted by TCD

All of my friends who owned a home computer used it mainly for gaming. Some used it also for other things like coding, music, or serious software, but the main reason why people got a home computer (no matter if 8 or 16 bit) was for gaming.

Part of that might be because they offered more potential for business or creative use anyway. All I did was play games, write programs on my 64 but on my ST I tried all sorts of things like pixel art with a mouse, sampling, using word processors for college assignments etc. I wanted an ST because it had a Mac like GUI and I wanted something more futuristic than typing on a command line.

I got the Amiga for Digi-view and potential for a top class version of Nemesis (Konami) to play at home. I had already discovered I had zero musical talent thanks to sampling on the ST. Desktop video via Dpaint III and coding in Blitz BASIC later on was the icing on the cake

To be fair the 520STFM for £300 in 87 wasn't really any more expensive than getting something like a CPC6128, cheaper than a C128+1571 or even just a BBC Master 128 + tape deck.

Everything I did on my 64 though was pretty much related to games except I once wrote something a bit like Mac Paint using a joystick to control the cursor (not good!) and a circuit designer using the same Mac like GUI interface because I was fascinated by the Mac 128k when it first came out (remember the adverts in the UK for 'test drive a Macintosh today' with the voice over by Ian Holm from Alien?). Other than that all my 64 coding was games related.

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

Of course there was some serious usage, which migrated towards the PC, but for a lot of folk replacing the computer with a games console that just did the one thing they cared about better was the way to go

Yeah, that's how it felt like to me too, people who were in the market for a cheap 16bit computer for around £300 definitely started to reconsider their options when the MegaDrive previews started hitting magazines in 1989. Definitely if you were playing arcade games and wanted a good version to play at home. Apart from Chase HQ the consoles had you covered here, whereas the Amiga complex arcade ports were hit and miss.

The cheapest colour PC I know of around the late 80s was about £600 (inc colour EGA monitor) and you couldn't use your TV with it like you could with ST/MD. I doubt people in the EU in the 80s ever bought a PC even for 60/40 split of gaming/business work but then I didn't know anybody who had a PC in the 80s so who knows what was going on in DOS PC households in the UK.

It felt like a split between gamers, people who wanted to do creative things and gaming (A500 best option in the 80s) or just the odd sedentary game and business tasks.

To some extent the Amstrad PCW8256 was the forerunner to this split, you could do word processing and spreadsheet stuff much better on a 520ST but there were quite a few games released for the PCW so I guess there must have been quite few used for home business/small business/sole trader use instead.

The difference is you had loads of options in the shops back then, now you don't....Mac or PC (identical hardware, just a different OS) or do your accounts on your Smartphone....that's it. Hardly any exclusive console titles either and the Sony and MS console games use identical source code just compiled to a different runtime executable etc too.

Future turned out pretty shit actually IMO

[Megalomaniac]

'Intention' is perhaps the key word in what I said. I suspect a lot of us struggled to find motivation for word processing or Deluxe Paint or programming once we saw how great some of the games were. Maybe it depends how old you were when you got the Amiga, though perhaps also how old you were when you moved on - maybe you treated yourself to a SNES for most games, but kept the Amiga for serious stuff (and perhaps 'serious' games)?

Still, at least in the UK, magazines which covered all aspects of using an Amiga (Format and CU Amiga especially) outsold the ones which only covered games (Power / Action / The One). The serious software on their coverdisks, and the tutorials, must have been a factor.

[CCCP alert]

I guess I wanted an Amiga for 3 main reasons in 1986.

It was a multi-tasking GUI based computer
It had photo-realistic [on a 14" CRT display] potential for pixel art via HAM
It had actual realistic sound (and 4 channels of them).

So it was a step up from my ST.

I would never have bought an Amiga if Marble Madness/Defender of the Crown looked/sounded shit of course but I was at that age where I wanted something sophisticated, even more sophisticated than the 520ST with GEM on my desk I was very lucky to own in my mid teens back then.

The C64 by contrast was more a case of getting something better than the VCS I had, Zaxxon's choppy scrolling on Coleco was an instant 'avoid that' and possibly writing my own games maybe. It really was all about the games aspect for me as a kid/early teens. Sure I drooled over the preview pictures of Ancient Mariner for ST in CVG magazine but it wasn't just about games. Perhaps the fact I only had a tape drive, or that NLQ dot matrix printers very were expensive or that my school wouldn't even accept typed submissions for school work etc had a big impact on it but 40 columns and word processing don't really work IMO once you've used a typewriter, which is why the BBC and CPC were better for that sort of general purpose home computer, sort of an 8bit Atari ST if you like IMO.

It's going to be different for everyone though, that's just how it was for me.