ccovell wrote:koitsu wrote:Home computers (specifically the ones you listed off: C64 and Apple II series) were not *primarily* used for playing games "back then". They were multi-purpose machines, and in most households were certainly used that way. For example, the IIE my family had was used for word processing and spreadsheets in AppleWorks...
We like to think it's this way everywhere, but honestly we have a skewed North American perspective. Over in Europe, it was all about games. UK C64 mags used to look over at American software and ask, "Why are they all so into Visicalc and Banner makers? Cybernoid is where it's at." The Amiga mags were the same, with "Beardy Americans doing video production" on one side of the pond, vs. "Pimply Euros playing Shadow of the Beast and making cracktros" on the other. The rarity of C64 disk drives compared to the ubiquity of C2N cassette storage in Europe, vs. quite the opposite in N. America bears this out. Commodorians still debate this over in their forums.
I think it depends on a lot of factors, and I don't think we can really make a broad regional generalization like that. At least, your experience doesn't exactly fit with mine, but there are a lot of angles to this and we might be looking at incomparable things.
Like, if you ask me what I primarily did with my Atari ST growing up, it would be games, for sure. If you asked my dad, it would not. Which of us was the primary user of the computer? It is a different story depending on whom you might be talking to.
It also varied over time, as the 90s went on, the games market got a lot bigger. Part of it was that computers were getting cheaper. There's a gigantic difference in the market from, say, 1987 and 1993.
Similarly, depends on system, depends on region, all sorts of other factors, so my confidence in being able to compare experiences is low.
Anecdotally speaking I actually read more British computer magazines than US ones growing up. The British magazine ST Format wasn't any more skewed to games than US magazines, so far as I could see, at least not if you're comparing contemporary issues. ST Format outlived the US magazines I read, so in its later years it did have more games coverage, at least. Since my interest was primarily in games I always found it annoying how much paper (and cover-disk data) was dedicated to not-games.
http://www.stformat.com/
Part of why the magazine lasted longer in Britain, I got a sense that a lot more people were using older hardware there instead of upgrading. Lower entry cost might have made buying a computer for games more feasible than it had been in the US?
C64 wasn't my scene, so it could have been totally different than the ST. Also, I had no news from non-English speaking countries, so for all I know things could have been different there as well.
Growing up my only source of computer news was through magazines. No internet, no local clubs. In the 80s I felt lucky that our family even had a computer. In the early 90s I started to have some friends that also had PCs at home. By the late 90s almost everyone had one. Right now games are bigger than ever, but even now I wouldn't say that games were the primary intended use for computers, in terms of share of the market and who is buying them / for what purpose.
I would say, definitely, that old computers in use now, C64, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, etc. are primarily for games, because that's the only kind of application worth going back for. Almost everything else is obsolete, but games don't really go obsolete, not in the same way. So... as time goes on, the purpose of all old hardware skews toward games, anyway. The people still talking about it will probably be games-oriented people. Again, skewing the perception of what these things were for. Someone who bought a C64 to do their taxes isn't going to be hanging out on forums waxing nostalgic about it today, only gamers, really. Not a fair sampling of the market, IMO.
Anyhow, complicated question.
And it's a bit of a moving target, ha ha.
