The Demise of the Personal Computer Dream in 1984

[jedishrfu]

https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/28/christmas_1984_home_computers/

Remember the excitement of leafing through a catalog for home computer bargains? Or perhaps gazing longingly at festive tech displays in Britain's WH Smith (or ComputerLand if you lived Stateside)? Take a step back to 1984 and the last great hurrah of the home computer.

The video game crash of 1983 had already happened in the US, but the UK's home computer market was still buoyant in 1984, even if the cracks of over-saturation were already starting to show. This writer, glued to the BBC's television production of The Box of Delights, certainly didn't realize it at the time.

A browse through the pages of the 1984 booklet from famous Brit catalog retailer Argos shows computers from Atari alongside the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The shelves of retailers were packed with products from manufacturers that, in hindsight, were perhaps a bit over-optimistic.

Still, in 1984, UK consumers were spoiled for choice. As well as Sinclair's products, the BBC Micro was available alongside the Acorn Electron. There were new computers from Commodore in the form of the Plus/4 and Commodore 16.

 

[jedishrfu]

All great things come to an end. The personal computer era was fun and exciting, but big business entered the fray. We lost our way, devolving into packaged software and games and the demise of creativity as we knew it.

 

[Borek]

We lost our way, devolving into packaged software and games and the demise of creativity as we knew it.

Yes, it is a different market, but there were over 8k indie games published on Steam this year.

Plus, video game crash killed the game consoles market, not personal computers market, which was just starting to emerge - and filled the empty space.

 

[jedishrfu]

I'm referring more to the hobbyist and creative vibe that existed for a few years and then vanished as big business entered the picture, and some hobbyists saw a chance to profit from their games.

There was a shift from anything goes programming to playing games that someone else sold you.

 

[Baluncore]

I'm referring more to the hobbyist and creative vibe that existed for a few years and then vanished as big business entered the picture, and some hobbyists saw a chance to profit from their games.

There was an initial learning curve, that could not progress without the early generation of home computers.
Once the stable platforms appeared in the market, the developers of 3rd party software could advance into the market.

 

[Borek]

I believe most of these 8 thousand indie games still land in the "hobbyist and creative vibe" area. Yes, standards has changed and there is no way for hobbyists to compete with huge teams producing AAA games, but with current tools (and I don't mean AI, just engines like Unreal or Unity) it is still possible to publish single-handedly an interesting game based on some creative idea.

And popularity of small home projects build by people around me on machines like Raspberry Pi suggest this "anything goes programming" approach is still strong.

What has definitely changed is that computers became used not just by technically inclined hobbyists, but also by everyone else. These people treat computer as a tool, without bothering to understand the details, so yes, the hobbyist group became just a small fraction of computer users. But that's a different kind of shift.

 

[russ_watters]

I don't understand what this article is about, can someone explain it? Is it about the time before PCs standardized around Microsoft OSs?

 

[jedishrfu]

My take was its about how business came in and standardized everything, and personal became more of a commodity. The hobbyist vibe was lost in the mix.

 

[tech99]

When I bought my first little computer, a Sinclair ZX81, I was able to plot graphs of all sorts of physics formulas in my text books. With additional memory I even wrote programs for radio propagation. Then my company installed computers, which I thought would transform my engineering job, but unfortunately they said under no circumstances could users write programs or use their own software. This largely killed the potential usefulness of the computer at that stage.

 

[berkeman]

I can recommend a very interesting book that covers the birth of the PC and the movers and shakers that were involved: "Fire in the Valley". In this case "the Valley" is Silicon Valley, with an extension to include Microsoft up in Washington.

https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Valley-...p-1937785769/dp/1937785769/?tag=pfamazon01-20

 

[Rive]

I'm referring more to the hobbyist and creative vibe that existed for a few years and then vanished as big business entered the picture

I would rather account that on the size of the projects instead. It was relative easy to cook up a game when it had to fit into 32k (or a small floppy disk, at most) or so, and everything around had that half-baked look anyway.
But then you got 640k to fill up, and some more data on the HDD.
Then you got 1MB for VGA memory only... And things so went on and on, spinning out of the capabilities of one-man 'teams'.

 

[jedishrfu]

Of course, business interest in the personal computer drove big businesses to enter and make bigger machines that were less affordable to hobbyists. Also, hardware got more formalized, and we lost color, sprites, and player missile graphics for quite a while as ega and graphics cards took over because of better resolution.

Business use cases didn't need or want koala pads or novel hobbyist creations, and the industry left hobbyists in the dust.

The dawn of the microcomputer was a unique time filled with imagination and creativity. Kids programmed all sorts of crazy things, but now games that resemble movies are written in studios with hundreds of developers, artists, and marketing folks.

 

[gleem]

What about Rasberry Pi? Hasn't it resurrected that pioneer spirit? Sure it is more powerful than anything from the 70's but hobbyists are more sophisticated now.