The computer comes home
In the 1980s, the personal computer went from a hobbyist project to a common consumer and office product. Machines were sold in department stores and electronics shops, magazines filled with type-in programs, and “computer literacy” became a topic for schools and employers. The decade is often split into two stories that overlapped: inexpensive home computers, and the business machines that became the PC standard.
Home computers
Many households met computers through low-cost machines that connected to a television set and loaded programs from cassettes or disks. In the United States, Commodore’s VIC-20 and Commodore 64 sold in large numbers, and Atari and Apple were also major names. In Britain, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro became familiar, the latter being widely used in schools. Japan, continental Europe and other regions had their own popular systems.
Most of these computers started up with a BASIC interpreter, so owners could write simple programs right away. Games were the main commercial software, and a generation of young people learned to program by typing in listings or modifying games. Many of these systems were sold with limited memory and modest graphics by later standards, yet people created surprisingly lively software on them.
The video game business saw turbulence too. In North America, the home console market contracted sharply around 1983, which historians commonly call a crash, partly because too many poor-quality games and consoles flooded stores. Nintendo’s Family Computer, released in Japan in 1983 and sold in the United States as the Nintendo Entertainment System a couple of years later, helped revive the market.
The IBM PC and compatibility
In 1981 IBM introduced its Personal Computer, built mainly from parts available from other suppliers, with a processor from Intel and an operating system from Microsoft called PC-DOS, sold to other makers as MS-DOS. IBM’s name gave businesses confidence to buy. Because the design relied on standard components, other firms found ways to build compatible machines, and by the middle of the decade “IBM compatible” was a selling point. Software written for one such computer would usually run on another.
That shift mattered more than any one machine. It created a large shared market in which software developers could write a program once for many buyers. Spreadsheet software, in particular Lotus 1-2-3, released in 1983, and later word processing and database programs became standard office tools. The market for PC clones also pushed prices down and gave rise to a number of new companies.
Graphical interfaces
For most of the decade, personal computers were operated by typing commands. At the start of the decade, researchers at Xerox had already shown windows, icons and a mouse on experimental machines, and Xerox sold a commercial workstation, the Star, in 1981. It was expensive and sold in small numbers.
Apple introduced the Lisa in 1983, which was also costly, and then the Macintosh in 1984, which brought a graphical user interface to a more affordable machine. Competing systems followed: Microsoft released the first version of Windows in 1985, and the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST offered graphics and sound in the mid-1980s. Early versions of Windows were limited, and most PC users stayed with text-based DOS for years. The Macintosh together with a laser printer and page-layout software helped create desktop publishing, a field that changed how newsletters and printed material were produced.
Storage and portability
Floppy disks were the main way to store and share software. The 3.5-inch format with a hard plastic shell spread during the decade, and hard disk drives became more common on business computers. CD-ROMs, introduced in the middle of the 1980s, offered large capacity for reference works, though the market stayed small until the next decade.
Portable machines also began to appear. Early “luggable” computers were heavy, and by the late 1980s lighter laptop computers arrived that could run on batteries. Their screens, memory and battery life were limited, so they were used mainly by business travelers.
Networks
Behind the scenes, networking was growing. In 1983 the ARPANET switched to the TCP/IP protocols that underlie the modern internet, and universities built campus networks. Offices increasingly connected computers on local area networks to share printers and files. Dial-up bulletin board systems let home users with a modem exchange messages and files, building small online communities.
The decade also brought a darker side. Some of the earliest widely reported computer viruses spread on floppy disks, and in 1988 a self-propagating program known as the Morris worm disrupted a significant part of the internet of the time. These events started broader conversations about computer security.
What the 1980s changed
By 1989 a computer was a familiar object, though far from universal. Ownership varied widely by country and income, and many users had only a basic grasp of what they were doing. The decade settled the main hardware standard for office computing, made graphical interfaces a serious option, and prepared the ground for the internet era that followed.