>Video games came out after thousands upon thousands of machines were sold
>and people wanted something to do on them after the initial novelty wore
>off. Did the advertisements for the first computers show people playing
>games on them, or were they hyping the office apps? I wouldn't call the
>Atari 2600's from the 1970's a computer.
Most of the early home computers were sold for games. Most of the
software available was games. Most of the early magazines talked
about programming, and guess what they were programming, games!
Please note, I'm basically ignoring the S-100 bus systems. But even
on those, games were a big thing. As for the IBM PC and clones,
initially those were more of a office type system, rather than a home
computer.
> > This is silly and specious. There were PLENTY of uses for a computer in
> > the home back in the 1970s: word processing is just one obvious
> > application. You are over-looking the thousands of unique uses people
> > found for computers at a personal level.
>
>People didn't program word processors, others did and then sold those
>packages. Just about everyone I knew had a typewriter in the 70's and not a
>home computer. It wasnt untill the C64 in the 80's along with Atari 800s,
>Sinclair and other 8 bit machines that personal computers were sold in the
>millions and had enough memory and storage to be usefull word processors.
Interesting, people didn't program word processors? Strange, I'm
sure I'm not the only one on this list that wrote a simple word
processing type app for their first computer.
As for typewriters, I still have one on my desk at work, I find that
a typewriter is still useful, even now.
Zane
--
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh_at_aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
Received on Tue Sep 21 2004 - 20:46:20 BST