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My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48, an 8 bit computer, I got it for christmas in 1982. When I was in the computer shop with my parents in Paris, I looked briefly at the Intellivision and Atari 2600 and I spent most of my time playing Mine Storm on the Vectrex, I was impressed by the vector graphics, meanwhile my parents were talking with the salesman about the microcomputers.

I wanted to buy the Vectrex but my parents told me there were only games for this machine, they thought the Spectrum was better because there were more games, it could be programmed and the price/feature ratio was good. In retropect, it was the right choice, the games were good and I liked programing in BASIC.

A friend of mine had in Atari 2600, I thought the game were fun and well done.

At school, there were computer rooms with microcomputers, they had:

Dragon 32 or 64, I thought this computer was worse than Spectrum. It had lower graphics and slower CPU.

Sinclair ZX81 was previous generation Sinclair computers, it had too little RAM and lower graphics

Oric Atmos, less software was developed for this computer compare to the Spectrum.

Commodore 64, better than the Spectrum and too expensive.

Thomson TO7, it had a 1Mhz CPU and was a bit slow. But it had an optical pen and could draw straight line on the screen. A friend had one because his parent wanted to buy a french computer.

Commodore VIC-20, it had less RAM than the Spectrum.

Thomson MO5, the Spectrum was better (1Mhz CPU).

When I saw the Sinclair QL, I didn't like it because there were not a lot of software for it and it was too expensive, I was impressed by the 128kb of RAM. I didn't know about the 32bit CPU and I thought it was a Z80 CPU.

The computers during this period were not compatible with each other, so it was very important that the wanted set of software was available for the chosen computer. They were booting to basic so most kids were programming in basic.

In 1986, a friend of mine had a Thomson TO9+, this computer had a 1Mhz CPU and I thought that's bad all other computers have faster CPUs.

I saw the MSX in computer magazines, it was a powerful machine but too expensive.

I met someone who had an Exelvision, I thought there were some cool features: it had cartridges (it was fast to load programs, on the Spectrum it was taking between 10 and 20 minutes to load a program from tape) and it had speech synthesis and I didn't know about the other features (RAM, CPU and graphics).

One day someone my mom knew came to our house with an Apple Macintosh, I thought the good feature were the floppy disk, the mouse and the graphics but it was too expensive and it didn't have a lot of games.

Later my parents bought an Amstrad CPC 6128 because it was an improved Spectrum with 3 inch floppy disk, more RAM and better graphics with a palette of 27 colors with the right price. There were lots of software available for this computer, it was quite easy to port the games from the Spectrum to the CPC.

My uncle had an IBM PC 5150, I had CPM on the CPC and I thought MSDOS was similar and better but the screen was displaying only text in black and green, so I didn't like it. It was slow to start because it was checking the RAM at boot (the Spectrum and CPC were booting instantly).

In the 80s, the display resolution, the palette and the number of colors on screen were important and there were significant improvements. On the Spectrum, we couldn't display anything close to a photo. My PC with VGA and MCGA was the first computer display photos in 256 colors.

The best games were on arcade. They had better gameplay, more colors, better animation and better sound. The arcade games were ported to microcomputers and the best to worse versions were: Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC / Comodore 64, Spectrum.

Today, we can still play the 80's games, thanks to the emulators.

After this generation of 8bit computers, there were the Amiga, Atari ST, 80286 and 80386 PCs with VGA graphics.

Computers of the 80s