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Comment by bobajeff | Hacker News Reader

This, article more than anything shows the attitude the world had about computers in general. Which is that computers are for serious business people. Which was only true because prices were so high.

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> article more than anything shows the attitude the world had about computers in general. Which is that computers are for serious business people.

That was the attitude in 1965, but not in 1985 - the home computer market was already in full swing by then. The C64, Macintosh, PCjr, etc were all out before 1985.

"Laptops" were huge and heavy to the point of being portable desktop machines, and they all required an AC outlet to do anything more than like, an hour of work.

Even in 1985, the applications were only sort of there. You had word processing and spreadsheets and a few other office apps. After that, the only things left for consumers were programming, education and games. And in 1985, games were "over" because early hype had died down and the console market crashed. Media apps weren't there yet: the first Mac was a year old, and the Amiga appeared mid-way through the year.

A lot of what made computers part of people's lifestyle was networking, and that only hit mass adoption in the 90's.

Well were they wrong? What did the average person do with a 1985 computer? There was no internet and they were thousands of times less powerful.

Played games.

Yes. There were millions of home computers in 1985 and numerous BBS systems.

There were lots of "average" people with computers in 1985 -- largely to play games with, That was the time of "home computers" like the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Apple ][.

What people didn't have was laptops.

Sure we had them.

Carrying them to someone's place and spend the afternoon playing / coding. :)

The average person could run a spreadsheet. They could use a word processor. They could run a windowed operating system in color. They could learn to program. They could play games. They could paint in color on a computer. They could compose music on a computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga

Having used a 1985 computer like that it's actually a bit sad that now that we have computers and phones and tablets for $50 that are a thousand times more powerful than an Amiga but are not a hundred times more useful.

I personally do find a smart phone 100 times more useful, but that depends on what you use it for. A modern smartphone contains so many different sensors, combined with high-speed mobile access to the information and processing power of the intent that it has a pretty amazing range of capabilities (even if most of those are rarely used).

I just realised that HN was the worst possible place to leave that comment. I have no doubt there were many applications for computers in 1980s, and many home users. It just seems far less useful to the average person. How many people actually use spreadsheets outside of a business context? Or write music, or program, etc.

Games and word processing seem like they would be the best application. But there were specialized consoles and word processing machines at the time that were cheaper and better for those tasks.

>Games and word processing seem like they would be the best application. But there were specialized consoles and word processing machines at the time that were cheaper and better for those tasks.

No, there weren't. Compared to Amiga and Atari, there were no competitive home game consoles around (until around 1989 or so at least).

And of course "word processing machines" were not better in any way. Professional writers (writers, journalists, people writing scientific papers, scriptwriters, etc) were buying PCs for word processing, not any dedicated "word processing machines" (which were just electric typewriters with an LCD and some crude software).

I used spreadsheet software all the time back then, and used it basically as an early InDesign. Change cell shapes (to pixel precision), add borders to parts of the cell but not others, add no borders to a group of cells to make a giant text box, etc. Main thing I designed back then was character sheets for ADnD, but I designed other things as well. And those character sheets were super elaborate for the time. I wouldn't qualify as the 'average user' though, granted.

Before the internet we spent a LOT of time on BBSs!

And we generally had (sometimes indirect) access to the internet -- Usenet, uucp, email -- through some combination of Fidonet, WWIVnet, and somebody running an open-access Unix box.

And on those BBS systems there were door games as well as discussion boards, file download areas, etc.

The internet existed then too -- it's just that the national science foundation didn't allow what they called commercial traffic on it at the time. It was a wonderful resource for people learning to write software (comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.c) or who wanted to screw off (talk.bizarre).

And around that time '85 or '86, I had a PC Pursuit account that allowed me to hop all over the country to get to BBSs in other cities that weren't on one of the store-and-forward networks.

There was plenty for the average person to do with a 1985 computer -- provided they had a modem, telix, and kermit, xmodem or zmodem -- and an agreement with everybody in the house to check before picking up the telephone handset.

"...and an agreement with everybody in the house to check before picking up the telephone handset."

This! If anything I think the challenge provided us with a reason to explore. Things weren't always easy and that made it fun.

> What did the average person do with a 1985 computer? There was no internet and they were thousands of times less powerful.

I don't know if this comment should make me feel really old, or if kids today are just totally clueless.

Speaking personally for me, a bit of both.

Well, around that time, I run the only BBS in my small town. House of the red light. No need to tell about the contents of it I guess :) Good old times

We obviously banged them against a second "1985 computer" to scare off other tribes.

I wrote programs to draw graphics. It was common to have a function that would plot a line between two screen co-ordinates with a certain color. I learned how to put these into loops, changing the parameters each time, and getting really fun results. The joy of these machines was ( especially the Commodore 64 and such ) you could just turn it on, it booted in a few seconds, and you could start coding right away, at the prompt. There was no overhead, you just did it.

I learned to program in BASIC on my Franklin Ace 1200 [1] (dual floppy drives FTW), which was the beginning of the road that led me to a career in software development.

[1] http://www.oldcomputers.net/ace1200.html

I think the single most important issue with laptops in 1985 was that they were heavy.

Remember, that was the age of conspicuous consumption -- people went out of their way to show off how much money they had spent needlessly.

I had a T1100 around that time and the thing weighed like ten pounds, had horrible battery life, and a pretty crappy display.

So without access to AC power it was little more than an overpriced toy -- and with AC power, my desktop was far nicer to work on anyway.

I guess this is also true for current VR. serious business people -> serious gamer.

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