Depends on location. For example Poland in the eighties under russian occupation was 99% smuggling and black market: History of Polish computer trade fair 1986-20xx. HD video/hires images from Giełda Komputerowa na Grzybowskiej (1993).

Computers in the 80's (IBM PC's and their clones) were still very expensive for the average home user. Back then, owning a computer (I'm not referring to the 8-bit range of computers like your Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, etc.) was more of a luxury than a necessity for most people. Remember there was no internet and buying a computer just to play games didn't make any sense. That is why arcades and your 8-bit computers/consoles were so popular.

However, if you were fortunate enough to be able to afford a PC, then you normally went with what your budget allowed, which in most cases would have been the cheapest computer. Cheapest being (in the late 80's) an XT clone running at 8Mhz with 640K RAM and perhaps two 360K floppy drives and a monochrome monitor (either CGA or Hercules compatible).

The early 90's (for the average home user) transition to VGA and 386SX or DX CPU's and an 80 to 120 MB HDD. Sound cards and CD-ROM drives were a novelty. If you were fortunate, you could get an Adlib or one of the early Sound Blaster (or clone) cards.

Up to around 1994/1995, owning a PC was mainly for home office work (Word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) and later on playing some games. Towards the latter part of the 90's, once the internet started to become more main stream, and prices started to drop further, did more people buy PC's for playing games, browsing the Internet and for home office work.

I don't think that, for the most part of the 80's and up to the mid 90's did it really matter the type of case you got. You bought where you could get it the cheapest. Custom (clone) build systems were the most common.

In the 80's, you mostly bought a computer from a retailer (reseller) who either did a build out of various components imported from Taiwan or an IBM PC clone (like an Olivetti, Philips, Epson, etc).

In the early 90's, both my father and myself bought our computers from people who did that to earn an extra income and who in turn bought the components from the suppliers who imported those components (mostly from Taiwan). That way, you could save some money.

I was just a kid in Australia, but I remember the process of my dad buying our first home PC in 1990. He was not a computer guy at all, but got roped into a group buy through work. This involved us being able to demo a couple of options in our homes for a week.

The first demo unit was a Mac Plus. I just remember my mind being blown by Dark Castle.

We went with the second option; an XT turbo clone system. With the 386 reaching mass market prominence about this time, the XT was clearly old stock being sold to unwitting fools. The package was somewhat dolled up at least, with a 40MB HDD, EGA and a Star NX1000 colour printer. Modem or sound card though? Never heard of them. The old man definitely got screwed on that deal, and it was not cheap!

I had a sister living in Berlin and whenever I visited her, I made trip to a small computer shop just around the corner to buy some upgrade parts.

That shop was run by a Turkish owner that just looked like a very fat Mario. Extremely short, plumbers crack because his clothes didn't fit so well, mustache.
I believe he made a few...other deals in that shop because there were always people coming in and going straight into the backrooms. He always tried to sell me completely unrelated stuff, too - like dictionaries or strawberrys.

It was wild, but I always found some hardware there. A Voodoo Banshee, a Slot 1 P3 933Mhz...he had one box sitting in the corner of the shop that was FULL with only 3Dfx cards and sold those for like ~15€ each. If I only had known how valuable these would be just a few years later...

During the mid '90s it was basically reading computer magazines, looking up the minimum specs for the games that I wanted to play, talking to my friends about it, and then picking the right parts and getting the system assembled.

Unfortunately, technology moved so fast back then that gaming PCs became pretty much obsolete over the span of two years. Hardware prices were fairly high, and few people could replace their entire system over such a short time period. So my buddies and I did the best we could with what we had, occasionally upgrading the graphics card, CPU and adding more RAM.

The process became a bit more straightforward during the 2000s, but it still amounted to the same thing. Look up the games you want to play and build a PC around that spec. Thankfully, the internet made things a bit easier in that regard, and hardware wasn't becoming obsolete at such a breakneck pace as before.

The very first PC I owned came with a 386SX25, 1 MB of RAM and 60 MB hard-drive. As Joseph_Joestar mentioned above due to the fairly high costs of components back then, and my very limited budget as a teenager and later a student, the best option what to upgrade the system little by little.

I remember that I doubled my RAM from 1 MB to 2 MB to be able to play Doom. And I also bought a SB-Pro at the same time. Later I upgraded from 2 MB to 4 MB also to play some games but I forgot which game it was, maybe Doom2...

When Windows95 came out again I had to double the RAM. I had swapped the 386SX for a much faster 486DX2-66, but I needed 8 MB for Win95. Unfortunately Win95 was running terribly slow on the 486DX2 so I ended up going back to Win 3.11 while saving money for my next mobo and CPU, a Cyrix 6x86 P166+ which served me well until 3D games became a thing and hit the limits of the Cyrix.

Main drivers for upgrading were more demanding system/apps/games and competition with friends to have the best PC.

jesolo wrote on 2024-01-08, 07:30:

Computers in the 80's (IBM PC's and their clones) were still very expensive for the average home user. Back then, owning a computer (I'm not referring to the 8-bit range of computers like your Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, etc.) was more of a luxury than a necessity for most people. Remember there was no internet and buying a computer just to play games didn't make any sense. That is why arcades and your 8-bit computers/consoles were so popular.

I honestly struggle to see why a regular person would need a PC at all in the 80s. Home computers seemed to be just fine for all everyday tasks, as well as being better than PCs for gaming at the same time. I know 8bit computers were popular of course but I see that a ton of people did end up with a PC in their home back in the 80s too. Just not sure what that speed was really used for in the home? Were people just kind of making bad purchase decisions or have I missed something?

MyOcSlaps6502 wrote on 2024-01-08, 22:39:

jesolo wrote on 2024-01-08, 07:30:

Computers in the 80's (IBM PC's and their clones) were still very expensive for the average home user. Back then, owning a computer (I'm not referring to the 8-bit range of computers like your Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, etc.) was more of a luxury than a necessity for most people. Remember there was no internet and buying a computer just to play games didn't make any sense. That is why arcades and your 8-bit computers/consoles were so popular.

I honestly struggle to see why a regular person would need a PC at all in the 80s. Home computers seemed to be just fine for all everyday tasks, as well as being better than PCs for gaming at the same time. I know 8bit computers were popular of course but I see that a ton of people did end up with a PC in their home back in the 80s too. Just not sure what that speed was really used for in the home? Were people just kind of making bad purchase decisions or have I missed something?

I'm assuming you're calling "home computers" things like C64s, Apple IIs, etc, and "PCs" things like IBM PC compatibles, Macs, etc?

I think a completely "regular" person (in North America) probably didn't get a PC-class computer until the mid-1990s when the kids' schools really started to expect some things to be done on a computer or later in the 1990s, when the Internet started to go mainstream. If you didn't have kids in the house, then you easily could be like my aunt whose first computer was a hand-me-down IBM Aptiva K6 (which I've posted about too much) from my family in 2002 and whose first Internet connection was DSL. My dad had lots of fun teaching her to use a mouse too - unlike in the 80s/early 90s where computers came with mouse tutorials, there was no mouse tutorial in Windows 2000.

But there were a lot of people who got PCs for random purposes related to work. e.g. take documents home on a floppy, work on them in WordPerfect on your home PC, bring the floppy back to the office on Monday. Lots of people running home-based business, consulting, etc who just needed word processing, maybe some basic desktop publishing (on the Mac), etc. And in those days... well, compatibility was king - if you were exchanging floppies with WP 5.1 for DOS users, your setup needed to spit out WP 5.1 for DOS files.

Worth noting, too, there was a very cavalier attitude towards piracy back then. Lots and lots and lots of people would borrow the WordPerfect floppies from the office to install the software at home... and indeed, I think the more successful software vendors were the ones who didn't use annoying anti-piracy measures that prevented that. Serious productivity software cost way more back then - a full copy of MS Office 4.2, for example, was $6xx CAD in 1995 money, or $3xx if you were eligible for an upgrade/crossgrade discount, and they released new versions every two years or less. Today a home user can buy a 'perpetual' Office for something like $160CAD in 2024 money, or a subscription for $80CAD/year. That's the era when computers came with things like Microsoft Works and if you couldn't borrow the MS Office floppies from work, that's probably what many home users used. I would go to far as to argue that MS Office's dominance was in part built on this casual piracy which caused plenty of younger folks to become familiar with it when their parents otherwise wouldn't have spent the money on buying a retail copy.

The other observation I would make is that I do not think gaming drove 90+% of PC purchasing decisions until the late late 1990s, in part as people like me got older. But in, say, 1996, you played games on the computer that your parents had bought for other purposes. Sound cards were acquired as part of "multimedia PCs" (anybody remember MPC2?) and your parents bought the multimedia PC so you could use the CD-ROM encyclopedia for school. People often wonder why the first two Voodoo cards were 3D-only with that weird passthrough mechanism; I suspect one reason they did that is that that made it much easier to throw their card into a generic Compaq or Packard Hell with on-motherboard 2D graphics and a few PCI slots. There just weren't enough PC gamers with disposable money until the late, late 1990s to trigger the development of gaming-centric hardware...

Our first computer was the Apple IIe, I'm not sure exactly when we got this but was late 80's.
My father was a teacher but was also doing a degree. He had no interest in computers and the deciding factor would have been that Apple put computers into schools meaning he was at least familiar with the brand.
(who else remembers when schools might have 1 or 2 Apple IIe's on a trolly that would be wheeled in every now and then)

I had a friend who's dad was into electronics that owned a 286 and another friend owned a Mac. Thats the only computers I was really remember pre high school (1993)

We didn't upgrade till 1995 and that was because a family friend knew someone who was selling brand new Osborne 486/66's for 1/3 of the cost, which was still $1000 from memory which I still own. Osbone 486 DX2 66 VL-Bus (My 1st PC ever)

When the CD-ROM drive died, I phones all the local computer shops in the Yellow pages to find the cheapest.
We also upgraded to a 1GB HDD from a local shop when the original 420MB HDD was full.
I still remember when me and 2 mates when to a local shop to buy a network card each for LAN gaming
The RAM was slowly upgraded with 2nd hand 16MB sticks from computer fairs which is where most of our hardware purchases were done during the late 90's early 00's

That 486 lasted till 1998 when my parents gave me my own PII 400 from Gateway who had purchased Osborne Australia.
One of my friends recommended I upgrade the basic graphics to a 16MB TNT. Very good recommendation! 2 other friends also upgraded their 486's around this time.

Really the biggest memory from this era was how quick you were out of date. I was always asking my parents for a new computer as in 12 months' time Pentiums had become common enough that our 486's were already struggling. Duke3d/Red Alert was the final games I could play until 98. so it's only now am I experiencing the early years of 3d.

MyOcSlaps6502 wrote on 2024-01-08, 05:35:

What made you pull the trigger on whatever it was that you ended up buying back in the day, given the choices that you had, or at least knew of?

Where did you look for cases, components, peripherals, monitors or prebuilt packages and where did you buy? What spawned the interest in wanting to buy your first computer and or upgrade in the first place? What did you almost buy? Were you left satisfied? Any mistakes? Expectations and so on, all the detail you can remember regarding your decision making as well as approximate dates.

I was sadly not around for this so I can't start with my own experience. Would love to hear your experiences in their entirity though! Could make it easier to piece together if prefaced with location.

Generally, I would say that most purchases prior to the late 1990s were, well, made out of ill information.

First computer in my family was a Mac SE that my dad bought when I was 3 or 4 - I think a very computery guy he knew told him that if he wanted a computer that could make reasonable printed materials and be easy to use and not cost him his sanity, he needed a Mac, so he went down to the Apple dealer, spent a ton of money, and came home with a Mac SE with no hard drive and an ImageWriter. But I don't really know - that's just what I pieced together.

By the early 1990s, I was a big Mac guy and reader of Mac magazines. Mac world was fairly straight forward - obviously Apple would launch new machines when they did, there were third party accessories aimed at big-budget graphic designers, that was kinda it.

Ended up switching to DOS/Windows in early 1995. Bought what, with the benefit of hindsight, was a crappy machine, but I think you have to situate how things were at the time:
1) Magazines were probably the main source of information. Most glossy magazines published by IDG or Ziff-Davis were aimed at older IT professional types. So you could read a ton of articles about mail merging (it's amazing how obsessed everyone was with mail merging in the early 1990s, no one talks about it now). They had advertisements for stuff that you could order by picking up your phone and calling some number and handing over your credit card. And the magazines generally didn't talk about hardware very much, at least not in the ways to teach you what was good hardware vs bad hardware. Maybe there were one or two gaming-centric magazines but I certainly never saw them.
2) There was no Internet for practical purposes. You didn't have the Tom's Hardware and the AnandTechs reviewing things, teaching you how to build a PC, etc. You didn't have ecommerce. "Ecommerce" meant calling the people who had ads in the magazines and asking them to snail mail you their catalogue.
3) There were also free ad-funded computer newspapers. You could just grab them from boxes off the street. They had lots and lots of ads for generic white box clones from sketchy places and random parts. The type of places that you don't get a scared parent handing over $2000 to buy a generic 486DX2/66 clone from. I remember going with a friend who was buying a hard drive from one of those places in Ottawa, ON in maybe 1996 and... the seller didn't even have a store, he was just running his business out of his apartment that was overflowing with parts. Even the ones that had storefronts... eeeek... those storefronts were not friendly. But there were lots of those stores until the early 2000s - over time the survivors started selling fewer generic white box systems and more enthusiast-friendly parts, and the others went out of business.
4) Then you had the bigger stores. Some specialized stores that only did computers, some that also did TVs/consumer electronics/etc (e.g. Worst Buy, though they didn't come to Canada until the early 2000s, but there were home grown similar outfits around) or office supplies (e.g. Staples). Those were parent-friendly. Sold systems with warranties backed by big brands. But they mostly sold lousy systems from big clone OEMs (Packard Hell, AST, Compaq, etc) + IBM Aptivas. Maybe some Mac Performas too. And they loved to sell the monitor + computer bundle - a crappy, crappy CRT from the same company as the computer. They also sold tons of software including games and tons of peripherals.
5) You also had the VARs - the Apple dealers that sold Quadras and Power Macs, the Compaq dealers that sold DeskPros, etc. You found those in the yellow pages and... well, let's just say they were not really selling to families with teenage kids. This is the model that Dell would blow up by advertising computers directly everywhere... and gradually switching from phone ordering to Internet ordering.

The reality is that, basically, you went to the #4 type stores, you looked at the label with the number of megs of RAM and hard drive and the number of MHz, your parents took some comfort in the brand and the clean floors of the store, and... you hoped for the best. And a year later, when you filled up your hard drive, you realized that, oh, oops, this AST machine only has a single IDE channel rather than the standard two, so, sorry, you can't add a second hard drive without an ISA storage controller. And oh there's no indication that the BIOS supports drives bigger than 5xx megs, which was not exactly cool at a time when AST shipped the machine with a 420 megger, so if you wanted to replace the drive, hello overlay software.

And you learned over time by trial and error and then, as the Internet got mainstream, from newsgroups and web sites and whatnot. It's interesting - pretty much everybody I know started building their own computers in the early 2000s. Why in the early 2000s and not earlier? I think a combination of being old enough to not have parental anxiety issues to worry about, and the fact that the Internet told you what parts to buy, what parts not to buy, and how to put them together.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-01-08, 23:54:

Really the biggest memory from this era was how quick you were out of date. I was always asking my parents for a new computer as in 12 months' time Pentiums had become common enough that our 486's were already struggling. Duke3d/Red Alert was the final games I could play until 98. so it's only now am I experiencing the early years of 3d.

Yup, it was insane... and if anything, parents started to get more and more cynical because, well, why spend all this money to be back in the same position a year or two later?

Looking back, it just astounds me how quickly your equipment was out of date and how you just accepted it. Few days ago I was responding to a fellow on reddit who was complaining about the poor Windows 10 performance of an E4xxx C2D with 4 gigs of RAM and G41 onc-hipset graphics, and I was like... dude, that's a not-even-high-end computer from 2007, how can you expect anything out of it 15 years later? Back in 2007, a 15 year old computer would have been, oh, I don't know, a 386 with 4 megs of RAM and a 200 meg hard drive if you were lucky?

I would add that, really, this era ended with Vista. Vista was the last gasp of the that way of thinking, the OS/software that runs okay only on <18 month old hardware, but whose massively higher hardware requirements no one cares about because well, Moore's law and 18 months later, any machine would exceed those requirements dramatically and that was that. People who were finally happy with their XP machines and the software those machines ran just... didn't want to play this game anymore. So they said no to Vista, no to upgrading at the pace of the previous decade/decade and a half, and the PC market has... stagnated... ever since.

But in, say, 1996, you played games on the computer that your parents had bought for other purposes.

<grin>...in 1996, I was already parent =) Being born in the late 1950's, my take on this is completely different... and largely OT here =^)

giantclam wrote on 2024-01-09, 00:42:

But in, say, 1996, you played games on the computer that your parents had bought for other purposes.

<grin>...in 1996, I was already parent =) Being born in the late 1950's, my take on this is completely different... and largely OT here =^)

Yes... and presumably, being born in the late 1950s, your experience with computers started with bigger systems long before 1996?

VivienM wrote on 2024-01-09, 01:32:

Yes... and presumably, being born in the late 1950s, your experience with computers started with bigger systems long before 1996?

Indeed, big 'frames...primarily with industrial computer process control. When I left that field, I did my 'personal computing' on the C64/Amiga platforms. It was much later when my son got into computers, that I actually bought a 'PC' (terminology had changed by then) ... mostly driven by games, when the 3DFX voodoo appeared, and the Amiga was long 'dead' (and too slow =)....and then it was the same old story of upgrade, upgrade, upgrade as newer/faster hardware came out ... at least I was never stressed with any problems deciding what to buy for bday presents =)

edit: about 1990 stumbled on a business sale and bought IBM 5150 3270 package for 1/10 the company paid 5 years earlier....
Not long after that got learning about computer parts because the MFM drive died and needed to replace it so began thru all the computer related stuff.

Surprised that computer conventions haven't been brought up yet.

My dad and I would go to one every month or so. You'd see the ads in the newspaper or maybe you would get updates through e-mail. The organizers would rent out some venue - maybe a town hall, maybe a hotel conference room, maybe some outdoor spot. The interesting thing is that you'd see every class of vendor there: a legitimate manufacturer selling top-of-the-line monitors might have a booth right next to some old dude testing, buying, and selling refurbished RAM. You'd have enthusiast companies selling full systems, nerds with random parts spread on a tablecloth, and the shady guy selling floppies stuffed with warez for a dollar each.

We were a Frankenstein household so Dad and I would take extensive notes on the upgrades we were looking for. Maybe we wanted a new CPU, maybe we wanted software. I distinctly remember him spending $150 for 4MB of RAM one September for our new 486DX4-100. The following April when he traded it in for 8MB, the same dude offered him $10.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFf-mMxo8JI

MyOcSlaps6502 wrote on 2024-01-08, 22:39:

I honestly struggle to see why a regular person would need a PC at all in the 80s. Home computers seemed to be just fine for all everyday tasks, as well as being better than PCs for gaming at the same time. I know 8bit computers were popular of course but I see that a ton of people did end up with a PC in their home back in the 80s too. Just not sure what that speed was really used for in the home? Were people just kind of making bad purchase decisions or have I missed something?

There were only few reasons for private PC in the eighties:
- working at home doing accounting/engineering/writing
- learning how to use a PC, usually for a potential job
- enthusiasts
PCs started flooding home market after first usable Windows (3.0) release in 1990, at that point XT clones traded at somewhat reasonable ~$1000 with monitor.
In 1991 those same XT clones piled up at usual clearance spots for less than Amiga 500, and $1000 got you 286 with HDD and VGA. Going with 16bit console like $150 Genesis/$199 SNES was cheaper in the short run, but brutal $50-60 cartridge prices quickly added up.
1992 386SX was in that ~$1000 spot, perfect combo with Windows 3.1.

By the late 80s lots of folks were using them at work. You get used to writing on a PC pretty quickly instead of a typewriter, or hand written letters. That’s why we had one with WordPerfect.

Nothing. I was still only 10 by the end of the 90s. At first I complained to my parents that a lot of my classmates had computers and I didn't, then I complained that everyone had better computers then I did. I barely knew anything about computers and had no power over what I got. They didn't really value video games and our family was lower middle-class in the rural parts of an eastern bloc country right after the Berlin wall fell, so I just got whatever was cheap and available. Usually stuff that was over half a decade outdated. It wasn't until about 2001 when I started reading gaming magazines and develop an awareness through their hardware section what's the up-to-date tech of the time and how much it costs, what's good and what's bad. And at that point I could still only make suggestions.