Besides games, what was the purpose of home computers in the 80s?
What did regular home computer owners use their computers for?
1980s
Jaxson Bailey
Alexander Howard
Something something printer.
Evan Cruz
Computing.
Logan Price
Mostly word processing and spreadsheets
Joseph Moore
Yeah, printing basically.
Kayden Lewis
Word processing, spreadsheets, the occasional small database, and dialing up BBSes or the mainframe at work. Maybe some programming, as a hobby.
Joshua Nelson
Printing what?
Letters and so on I guess. No images though.
Levi Diaz
you could buy and install a special card that was a hardware interpreter for pascal. you could play with networking if you were lucky enough to be at uni. hacking wasn't as big as phreaking because the web hadn't been invented and phone lines were just for calls. you could open boxes and mess with connections in order to place fake calls pretending to be from the credit card company and try phishing numbers out of suckers. the 80's were great, people still said, "boys will be boys" when you got in trouble.
Carter Howard
You reminded me now. Home business accounting/bookkeeping software, possibly tax returns.
Jonathan Green
Most of it all boiled down to three things:
Data collection, data processing and data generation. They were, for the most part, tools for working with information. Word processing, spreadsheets, databases, instrument control and automation, most of the same things we do with computers today.
Letters, reports, records, charts, the same exact kind of stuff people usually print today. Printers didn't really have a problem with graphics, you just didn't get to preview them as easily.
Jace Turner
>you could open boxes
Please interpret for zoomers.
Blake Scott
Letters, documents, books, spreadsheets.
Also while PC couldn't do graphics, Mac could.
The whole thing with Mac was that the screen had the format of an A4 paper, so it showed you exactly how the printed page would be.
Hunter Green
Connor Foster
if you look in front of houses in residential neighborhoods you'll find these boxes from the phone company. you can pry them open and mess with all the connections inside them to screw with the phone systems. they're really basic systems that don't take much to figure out, so they used to get screwed with all the time. you would have to bring your own phone to splice into it along with any other hardware you were going to need. most people who did it had a phreaking kit they would snuggle up inside their coats or whatever.
Jose Cox
>Also while PC couldn't do graphics, Mac could.
*blocks your path*
The Mac's success was much more in the LaserWriter, PageMaker and the crisp high-DPI display. A4-friendly portrait displays didn't come until much later.
Jason Gonzalez
Adrian Brown
Matthew Cook
*burns a black hole in your wallet*
Jace Fisher
As it should be.
David Perez
I mean the CGA card/IBM PC solution.
IBM back then made Apple look like a joke in overpricing.
While apple had "we're arty and brandsy", IBM had "Mr.Anderson, did you know that no one ever got fired for buying IBM?"
Lincoln Adams
>be me
>father was a VP in his company
>foreign parent company didn't like computers. >North America division buys 4 computers in secret
>on weekends company picnics involve getting the hidden computers kept at home from the trunks of cars and setup in office
>wives and kids eat and play outside on picnic benches
>North Americas inventory and forcasts are 300% better than any other division and nobody knows why
>find out my fond childhood picnic memories are the results of determined business men evading Luddite policies and being excellent
>Lotus 1-2-3 only needed 4 shades of green to "excel"
Cameron Bennett
I posted a PGC, not a crappy CGA, that thing could handle 640x480x256 while Apple was still trying to get the Lisa off the ground. PCs could do just about anything if you really, really wanted them to. A CGA/MDA XT was pretty inexpensive by the time the Mac was selling in any volume anyway, and later Mac IIs could easily climb into the five-figure range just like their IBM and Compaq counterparts.
Both companies were quite average for big-name OEMs when it came to pricing, really.
Jordan Ross
>data processing and data generation
That's what I was wondering, what sort of data? Databases would compile names with phone numbers and addresses etc, but what else?
Anything mathematical that a calculator couldn't do?
>Printers didn't really have a problem with graphics
I meant the computers themselves. I remember printouts having the most basic graphical depictions, based on the machines/software's abilities.
Colton Ortiz
I see. But call display wasn't around then, so why was this necessary? Unless you intercept incoming calls....
And what is phreaking?
Jeremiah Diaz
>Lotus 1-2-3
I took a course on that, back in the WordPerfect days.
Jose Bell
>Lotus
I actually got my first job thanks to my uncle who set me up with a systems architect that started off doing Lotus for my dad.
He was a bit of a programmer too, crazy ass wizard used notepad and wrote everything on one line.
Jonathan Powell
>Databases would compile names with phone numbers and addresses etc, but what else?
I mean, just ask yourself, what do you use a database for today? Payroll and inventory control were definitely among the biggest drivers just as they still are today, but databases store a lot more than just records of people, they store just about anything you could shove into a computer that you want to analyze or generate reports from. Data collected from instruments, notable events, report cards, legal cases and people involved in them, you name it. It's not a very easy question to answer in a concrete way because the only accurate answer is pretty much "anything within reason" and so many organizations especially back then had some kind of solution tailored to only their specific needs. That's the beauty of a computer, whatever decade you're living in.
>Anything mathematical that a calculator couldn't do?
It really depends on what "calculator" means to you. Even back then the line between "real" computers and high-end calculators like HP's magnetic card programmables was quite blurry and really just a matter of marketing and practical interface limitations more than anything else, and even a lot of non-programmables at that point still were built around fully-fledged microcontrollers under the hood.
So the short answer is no, but a desktop computer was still far more capable than even the most expensive calculators that still suffered from very restricted memory, expansion, slower processors and limited options for software development. Architecture, potential and presentation is key.
>I meant the computers themselves. I remember printouts having the most basic graphical depictions, based on the machines/software's abilities.
Then sure, a lot of systems, especially home ones probably aren't going to give you much in the way of a preview if there's any at all before you actually print whatever graphics you're printing. Unless you're willing to pay.
Ethan Gray
>report cards
Yes, schools were the ideal model for database purposes.
As for the graphics printing, I meant that, while the printer could handle the task, the computer's graphics were limited to large pixel, mono colors, etc., and since the printer couldn't improve on that you didn't have much for image printing.
Carson Brooks
>since the printer couldn't improve on that you didn't have much for image printing.
Sure it could, printers are something completely independent of a computer's display logic and aren't necessarily subject to any of those limitations. Your PC might not be able to display a nice high-resolution chart on the monitor, but there's nothing stopping it from telling a printer or plotter with the right capabilities how to draw it. That was the whole reasoning behind things like PCL and PostScript, and a lot of those higher-end printers were often sporting onboard computers even more powerful than the workstations feeding them the data to print.
Josiah James
I see. That's still beyond regular home usage though, isn't it? Back in the 80s?
Gavin Sanchez
Thermal/impact printers were definitely ubiquitous and cheap but especially with inkjets starting to pop up by the mid '80s graphics certainly weren't something out of reach if you really needed them. Plotters were definitely expensive, though.
Oliver Miller
programming basic applications for your need, math, writing, finance tracking, to-do's, printing cards and lists and what have you
Communication on BBS systems and early internet browsers
Office software was by far and away the most popular, homes having a PC slowly changed the culture of having physical planners and document storage and writing letters
Gavin Peterson
>ubiquitous
lol ubiquitous
John Bell
>all sorts of other programs.