21 Sep
2004
21 Sep
'04
1:46 p.m.
Video games came out after thousands upon thousands of
machines were sold
and people wanted something to do on them after the initial novelty wore
off. Did the advertisements for the first computers show people playing
games on them, or were they hyping the office apps? I wouldn't call the
Atari 2600's from the 1970's a computer.
Most of the early home computers were sold for games. Most of the
software available was games. Most of the early magazines talked
about programming, and guess what they were programming, games!
Please note, I'm basically ignoring the S-100 bus systems. But even
on those, games were a big thing. As for the IBM PC and clones,
initially those were more of a office type system, rather than a home
computer.
This is silly
and specious. There were PLENTY of uses for a computer in
the home back in the 1970s: word processing is just one obvious
application. You are over-looking the thousands of unique uses people
found for computers at a personal level.
People didn't program word processors, others did and then sold those
packages. Just about everyone I knew had a typewriter in the 70's and not a
home computer. It wasnt untill the C64 in the 80's along with Atari 800s,
Sinclair and other 8 bit machines that personal computers were sold in the
millions and had enough memory and storage to be usefull word processors.