[cctalk] Re: on the origin of home computers

On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 3:59 PM Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: We (my family - I put up 1/3, my mother covered the other 2/3) got a PET in 1979. I came home from my first Dayton Hamvention in 1982 with a PDP-8. If a high school kid can scrounge a PDP-8 by the early 80s, I'm sure an adult with a real job could have done it a lot earlier. -ethan P.S. - 90% of what ran on that PET was games - commercial ones bought from Creative Computing and Instant Software and others, as well as lots of games typed in from books and magazines (Creative Computing, BYTE, Micro, etc). We didn't have a printer and the only storage was cassette tape, so word processing and other "serious" applications were off the table. I did have some utility firmware - an improved machine language monitor (NMON), which I used to write better games (hand port of Scott Adams' engine from BASIC to 6502 machine code), BASIC Toolkit, and BASIC Aid, used for writing better programs in BASIC. Yes, Bill, arcade games were better, but they cost $0.25 a play and I could play what games we had for hours on the PET. We didn't have an Atari or other home video game console. I also typed in and played several text adventures, something that was not available on a console or in an arcade. I'm not saying that nobody did "engineering work" on a home computer, but by 1980, we sure were playing a lot of games on home computers.