And some time later I found an Atari at a garage sale.
I’ve always how much I missed out getting in when I did. Kind of like kids these days in frontend frameworks not ever know ie conditional comment tags or csszengarden
I suppose a lot of this was true for the early PC days as well. Just with inferior graphics and interfaces.
After I sold my Amiga to get driving lessons I brought home an ancient 286 and made a text-adventure on it using TADs. The magic wasn't excluded from the PC world, it was just less colourful.
I think it looked something like this, but even older looking than this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/IB...
and it had nothing on it except a PDF reader or something, so I would pretend to write important documents and turn it on and off many times throughout the day because I couldn't really do much else with it, and I was running on fumes as far as using my imagination as there was literally -nothing- on it.
And yes, had a huge part of who I am today
I agree, Apple is nothing like it. Apple is the opposite because you don't need to know anything about how it works to use one, but that's their niche. With the Commodores, you boot up to a Microsoft BASIC prompt and crack open the manual.
LOAD "*",8,1
Getting software was more or less like the PC era, people copying stuff on disks and cassettes. In 80's Hungary they experimented with full program trasmissions over radio.
What was interesting to see is the immersion you can get with only 320x200 pixels. I only realized this after running an emulator on a PC and I got suddenly teleported back to HD land.
It was quite neat that I was able to play with these machines, but after getting a PC there was little desire to go back.
It felt that the computers had a soul, while the PC felt like a pile of hardware stuck together with duckt tape. that happened to work.
The uses that did take off involved children: education and gaming. Many "home computers" were basically video game consoles in terms of hardware, but they had keyboards and could be programmed. People sold commercial games for these systems, but they were also the first systems for which kids got interested in making their own games. You had to have an interest in programming the machine to a very low level in order to make a game; there was no Unreal or Unity to hold your hand. But the machines were simple and well documented; every bit of hardware (graphics chip, sound chip, joystick port, etc.) had info on how to program it in the manuals that came with the machine (at least for common machines like Commodore ones).
Some of them, most notably the Apple II (US) and BBC Micro (UK), were purchased by schools for educational purposes. Special "edutainment" programs would be run on them to teach kids things like math, reading, and geography. The most famous such program was The Oregon Trail, which simulated an expedition across the western United States before it was settled, but there were hundreds of such programs across the many different computing platforms.
In the 8-bit PC era, because it was unclear what people would use PCs for, it was also expected that they would come up with their own applications and to that end almost all of them came with the programming language BASIC, allowing the user to get started with programming right away. This was considered something of a high point in computing history, because it gave the notion that computers were there to be programmed and to do exactly what their users wanted. As 16-bit and 32-bit machines took their place, programming tools became optional add-ons and it took more and more time and cost to write useful programs for them. Some of the non-IBM-compatible 16-bit machines, like the Atari ST and Amiga, retained some of the "game console" architecture and had amazing graphics and sound capability. With the right tools you could do some really impressive things with them.
PCs didn't become common consumer products until the mid-late 90s when the biggest consumer killer app emerged for them: the internet. This corresponded nicely with the release of Windows 95, the first end-user Windows OS that could run full-fat 32-bit applications. Now that they had a primary purpose for the average consumer, interest in marketing them as programmable devices waned over the next three decades to the present day, when the idea is to prevent the end user from running any but preapproved software, especially on the PC's replacement as internet gateway: smartphones.
We had much more fun with our janky little machines back then, even if we couldn't do nearly as much. We've reclaimed a little of that with open source operating systems like Linux and BSD, but it's still not quite the same.