The Home Computer Hall

The glass

Most home computers of the early 1980s had no screen of their own. They came with a lead that plugged into the aerial socket of the family television, and a small circuit inside, called an RF modulator, turned the picture into something like a broadcast signal. The television tuned to it as if it were another channel. That route cost nothing extra, which is why it was everywhere, and it blurred everything it carried. Fine text smeared, and two bright colours side by side could bleed into a third.

Inside the computer the picture lived in memory, and memory was the expensive part. A machine with 16 or 48 kilobytes had to share them between the program, the game’s data and the screen. Many machines offered several display modes and let the program choose: a text mode of letters in a grid, cheap in memory; a sharp mode with few colours; a chunky mode with more colours and wide pixels. Artists on one popular machine often worked at 160 dots across, each dot twice as wide as it was tall, to get four colours in each small block instead of two.

Letters as pictures

A text mode is a grid of character cells, often 40 across and 25 down, and each cell shows one shape from a character set. Programmers soon noticed that the set could be redrawn. Swap the shape of a letter for a little picture of a brick, print a row of that letter, and you have a wall. Many games of the period were built this way, out of custom characters moved one cell at a time, which is why their movement has that crisp, stepping quality. The graphics were a font.

Colour, rationed

Each family of machines had its own idea of colour, and you could tell them apart from across a room. One British computer stored colour for each 8 by 8 block of dots rather than for each dot, which kept the whole screen under seven kilobytes and gave its games their sharp, bright look and their famous attribute clash, explained in the Golden Arcade. Another machine had a fixed set of sixteen colours, with muted browns and greys that gave its games an earthy tone. The first colour cards for office PCs offered four colours at a time from a couple of fixed sets, and cyan with magenta became a look of its own.

In the middle of the decade a new generation arrived with faster processors, mice, built-in disk drives and far richer video. One could show 32 colours chosen from 4,096, and had a special mode that put all 4,096 on screen at once for still pictures. By 1987 a new graphics standard for PCs offered 256 colours at once, and the beige box under the desk began to look like a games machine.

The loading screen

Games arrived on cassette tape, recorded as sound. A program loading from tape sounded like a long, rasping whistle, and some machines flashed coloured stripes in the border of the screen while the data came in, so you could see it working. A big game took several minutes. Publishers commissioned a picture to show while you waited, drawn in the computer’s own colours, and the loading screen became a small art form. Disk drives were faster but cost more, and in many countries tape stayed common until the end of the decade.

The input

The keyboard came first, because it was already there. A home computer was a keyboard with a computer inside it, and games used whichever keys the designer liked. Some machines had keys of rubber or flat membrane, cheap to make and tiring to hammer. Players got used to odd layouts: one key for up, the key below it for down, two keys on the bottom row for left and right. Many games added a menu option to redefine the keys, a small courtesy that became a habit across the industry.

Joysticks arrived by plug. A nine-pin socket first used on an early home console was adopted by many computer makers, so a stick with one fire button could move from machine to machine. Some computers needed an add-on box before they would accept one. The stick reported eight directions and a button and nothing more, which is why so many computer games of the time had only one action. Sports games found a way round it: run by waggling the stick left and right as fast as you can, an input that was hard on the stick and harder on the wrist.

Typing as playing

The keyboard also allowed something no console could do: you could talk to the game. A text adventure described a place in a paragraph and waited for you to type what you did next. Early ones understood two words, a verb and a noun, such as TAKE LAMP. By the middle of the decade the better ones understood whole sentences with several objects in them. The pleasure was in being understood, the frustration was in being misunderstood, and both were part of the charm.

The mouse reached homes with the new machines of the mid-1980s, and it made a different kind of game possible: point at a thing on the screen and choose what to do with it. Adventure games swapped typing for clicking, strategy games put a whole map under the cursor, and paint programs turned the computer into an easel for the people who would draw the next decade’s games.

The room

The room was usually a bedroom, sometimes a kitchen table, and often wherever the second television lived. The computer needed a screen, the family wanted the screen, and a small portable set on a desk became a familiar sight. On machines that used an ordinary tape recorder, the recorder sat beside the keyboard with its volume marked in pencil, because a notch too loud or too soft and the game would not load.

Magazines were the network. Each month they printed news, reviews, maps and pages of program listings: games written in BASIC, numbered line after numbered line, for readers to type in by hand. An evening of typing produced a game, or more often a syntax error on line 2,140. Fixing it taught more about programming than most textbooks. Later in the decade magazines began to fix a cassette to the cover, and the typing stopped.

Schools had computers too, often in a single room with a timetable for using it. In Britain a government scheme helped schools buy machines from the early 1980s, and many children first met programming there, in a lunchtime club run by a teacher who was learning alongside them. Shops left machines switched on for anyone to try, and a two-line program that printed a visitor’s name down the screen forever was the calling card of every child who passed.

The most unusual thing about this room was who could make games in it. A computer came with a programming language built in, and anyone with patience could write a game and post it to a publisher. Teenagers wrote hits in their bedrooms, and some of them went on to found studios that still exist. Budget labels sold games for less than the price of a record, so a pocket-money game was a real thing.

Groups of young programmers also began making short shows to prove what a machine could do, with scrolling messages, music and effects nobody thought possible on that hardware. That scene, the demoscene, still meets today, and several European countries have listed it as part of their cultural heritage.

Three design ideas we borrowed

1. Small rooms, no luck

   A puzzle about pushing boxes onto marked squares was first published for a Japanese home computer in 1982, and people are still designing new levels for it. Crate Courier keeps the rule that made it last: no timer and no chance, only a warehouse and your own plan. Every one of the sixty levels was solved by a computer before it shipped, and undo is free, because the puzzle is the thinking.

   Crate Courier, 1992 Play Crate Courier

2. Let the player cut the map

   A famous home computer game of 1984 was about digging through earth while the boulders you had undermined came down behind you. Neon Burrow keeps the falling rocks and adds a twist: the patrol follows your tunnels, so every shaft you dig is also a road for them. The level is something you write as you play, which suits machines that built their worlds from a grid of characters.

   Neon Burrow, 1984 Play Neon Burrow

3. Say it in words

   Hollowmere is a text adventure, the form that grew up on home computer keyboards. You type short commands, the old house answers in sentences, and a map fills in as you explore. We added word chips for touch screens and an undo, two kindnesses the originals could rarely afford, and kept the main pleasure intact: the moment the game understands exactly what you meant.

   Hollowmere, 1993 Play Hollowmere

What ended the era

The home computer did not so much end as split in two. For games, the 16-bit consoles of the early 1990s did in the living room what computers had done in the bedroom, with no loading, no typing and a pad in each hand. For everything else, the office PC won. It gained a 256-colour display, then sound cards and CD drives, and by the early 1990s it was the computer families bought for homework and play alike. The 8-bit machines left the shops, and in 1994 the company behind the best-selling home computer of the 1980s went bankrupt.

What it left behind is everywhere. The habit of making a game alone, and the belief that you are allowed to, comes from here. So do redefinable keys, the loading screen as a canvas, and a whole literature of interactive fiction that people are still writing. Many of the people who built the games of the next thirty years started with a tape that would not load, a listing with a typo in it, or a computer in the corner of a classroom.

Further reading

These links are general, stable and free to read. They are the best places to go next.

• Home computer (Wikipedia) The machines of this hall as a family, with dates and prices.
• ZX Spectrum (Wikipedia) The British computer with colour attributes and a rubber keyboard.
• Commodore 64 (Wikipedia) Sixteen fixed colours, hardware sprites and a famous sound chip.
• Type-in program (Wikipedia) Games printed in magazines for readers to type in.
• Interactive fiction (Wikipedia) Text adventures and the parsers that read them.
• Demoscene (Wikipedia) The scene that grew out of home computers, and where it meets now.