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<title>Vintage Home Computers</title>
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<h1>1980's Home Computers</h1>
<p>In early 1980's, home computers became mainstream. For the first time, computers could be
purchased by an average family household.</p>
<figure>
<img src="images/computer.png" alt="A computer with a monitor">
<figcaption>Photo: Piotr Siedlecki, public domain via <a href="http://www.publicdomainpictures.net">http://www.publicdomainpictures.net</a>.</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Novel uses</h2>
<p>The main usage for a home computer was, of course, games. As cool games may not be a valid reason for purchasing an expensive gadget,
a wide variety of potential uses were invented to satisfy those family members who might otherwise be sceptical.
</p>
<p>Some reasons often mentioned were:</p>
<ul>
<li>learning to write computer programs</li>
<li>managing family finances</li>
<li>keeping track of freezer contents</li>
</ul>
<p>While some of these use cases are perfectly valid, it is still unclear how many families actually used
their brand new home computer (duly equipped with a cassette drive) to actually record every food item they removed from the freezer.</p>
<h2>Legendary computers</h2>
<p>The three most memorizable 1980's home computers, in subjective order of importance, might be:</p>
<ol>
<li>Commodore 64</li>
<li>Sinclair ZX Spectrum</li>
<li>Commodore Vic-20</li>
</ol>
<p>Read the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocomputing">Wikipedia article for Retrocomputing</a>.</p>
<h2>Key concepts</h2>
The hardware charateristics of a home computer could be defined by its graphics and sound capabilities, CPU, and amount of memory. The types of memory were:
<dl>
<dt>RAM</dt>
<dd>Random access memory. The memory usable by programs. The amount was typically in the ballpark of 20 to 64 kilobytes. However, the Basic interpreter by default consumed a part of this.</dd>
<dt>ROM</dt>
<dd>Read-only memory. This was normally smaller in size than RAM and roughly corresponded to the hardware implementation of the operating system.</dd>
</dl>
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<p>Disclaimer: <em>All opinions in this page reflect the views of their author(s), not the organization.</em></p>
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