What did people use home computers for, before the internet?

Question

From the early days of the PC to the mid-90s, what was the point of a home PC? Games? Even those sucked. Spreadsheets? Fine, but who would spend 2000 dollars ( or more) on a computer in 1985 dollars to play around on a primitive spreadsheet?

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

These computers had games, although primitive ones, and they had a word processing software and encyclopedia/research disks.

Also there was internet: AOL version 1.0, Prodigy Service, CompuServe with the lightning fast turtle speed of 56k dial-ups

Answer 2

A home PC was basically a glorified typewriter. You had the advantage of not needing white-out or wasting paper if you made a mistake. It was also a kind of cheap art-maker: Print Shop let you make covers for book reports, or greeting cards, or even banner for events. Graphs and spreadsheets also had a lot of implications and practical uses, not just with school, but with a job as well. Your presentation is going to be more respectable if it looks like you didn't just cut up construction paper and wildly guess how much of the pie chart was 17%. It was a home Kinko's. Sure, Kinko's was 24hrs/7days, but it wasn't in your home office or living room.

On the games side of things: PC games didn't have the plug-and-play simplicity of their console counterparts, but they usually offered a slightly more immersive experience, such as a flight simulator or most sports games. Zork would have failed miserably on the NES, and Ultima would never have been able to make the leap to online if it had only the closed-market of the Sega Channel to find its users.

Source(s):

Console gamer who admits to a dependency on PCs... curse their beige casings and annoying printers.

Answer 3

Data storage and easy information filing. Imagine if all the information you'd ever stored in your computer was in a typical filing cabinet (which you would have to constantly update and scroll through to find items). That was generally the purpose the computer was so popular at office jobs in its early days.

Answer 4

Hello Poyzin;

Actually I remember those days, the first killer app was word processing. Just writing letters or other documents was a lot easier to use a computer then typing.

Business applications like bookkeeping were very big ... and if you had a lot of math to do the spreadsheets on an ancient computer were better than having to do it by hand.

There also networks for file sharing, using telephone line and modems (2400 bps).

Last -- and this might seem a little strange but I enjoyed programming.

I hope that helps,

Bill

Answer 5

Before the internet or what you might be referring to as the internet (i.e. the world wide web) I was working as a Unix administrator. I worked for a government defense sub contractor and we used the Unix boxes at work for delivering technical manuals of helicopters, planes, parts and engines.

Just prior to this time I had worked for a rich guy on the side - He made me test every program that came on the market and evaluate it for its potential use. He spent closer to $10-20k on those early i8086, 286 and 386 machines. When folks have time and money they do strange things but in this case it helped to prepare me for my career.

Answer 6

hey I have been using computers for a long time my first one was a commodore 64, but it was ok the games came on a cassette and you could of done a lot of self programing for various things but it wasn't much later that IRC came out so it was ok you could chat, download and find things around the world it's what your internet today is based on. But then again I am not that old I was 4 when I learned how to make games on a commodore! LOL

Answer 7

Perhaps they buy it to show that they are rich and very updated. By the it show their high status. ^^

Answer 8

Was microsoft out yet during those time?lol