CODE & BOOKS

A short history · 1977–1994

When computers came home

For about fifteen years, the machines a generation learned to program on were the same machines they played on. They had a few kilobytes of memory, a handful of colours and the family television for a screen — and they were enough to start an industry.

  • 128bytes

    of memory in the Atari VCS. The program draws the picture line by line, while the television is drawing it.

  • £125 

    for a 16K ZX Spectrum in April 1982. More than five million were sold.

  • 12.5–17million

    Commodore 64s sold: the best-selling desktop computer model of all time.

  • 4,096colours

    in the Amiga palette in 1985, and all of them on screen at once in HAM mode.

Chapter I

1977–1981

The machines come home

In 1977 a computer stopped being a room and became a box you could carry home and plug into a socket.

Three machines went on sale that year that needed nothing more than power and a screen: the Apple II in June, the Tandy TRS-80 in August and the Commodore PET in October. They came to be called the 1977 Trinity. Each had BASIC built in: you switched it on and it waited for you to type.

In September Atari launched the Video Computer System, later renamed the 2600: a 6507 processor, 128 bytes of memory and no screen memory at all. To make a picture, the program has to keep pace with the electron beam of the television and rewrite the graphics for every line it draws. An estimated 30 million were sold, and it stayed in production until 1992.

In the arcades, Space Invaders (1978) and Pac-Man (1980) turned video games into a public craze. When Space Invaders came to the VCS in 1980 it sold 1.25 million cartridges and nearly doubled the number of consoles in use. Computers kept getting cheaper: Sinclair’s ZX80 cost £99.95 in 1980, and the ZX81 £49.95 as a kit a year later.

Timeline

  1. Apple II
  2. Tandy TRS-80
  3. Atari Video Computer System, later the 2600our books on the Atari 2600 →
  4. Commodore PET
  5. Space Invaders in the arcades
  6. Atari 400 and 800, with custom graphics and sound chips
  7. Sinclair ZX80, £99.95
  8. Pac-Man in the arcades, Space Invaders on the VCS
  9. Sinclair ZX81, £49.95 as a kit
  10. BBC Micro, for the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project

Chapter II

1982–1984

A computer in every bedroom

In 1982 the home computer became a mass product, and the people who bought one started writing the software themselves.

The ZX Spectrum went on sale in Britain on 23 April 1982, at £125 with 16 KB and £175 with 48 KB. It stores colour once for every 8×8 block of pixels, which saves memory and forces every game to be designed around it. The millionth Spectrum was built in December 1983; more than five million followed.

In August 1982 Commodore put the 64 on sale in America at $595: 64 KB of memory, eight hardware sprites, smooth scrolling and the SID, a three-voice synthesiser on a chip. Jack Tramiel wanted computers “for the masses, not the classes”, and cut prices again and again in a war that pushed rivals out of the market. Estimates of sales run from 12.5 to 17 million: no single computer model has sold more.

These machines plugged into the family television, loaded their programs from audio cassettes and started with BASIC on the screen. Magazines printed programs for readers to type in, line by line. In Britain more than 450 companies were selling games on cassette by the end of 1983, and thousands of teenagers were writing them at home. Some of these bedroom coders built companies that shaped the industry, like the Stamper brothers, who founded Ultimate Play the Game and then Rare.

In the United States, meanwhile, the console market collapsed. Too many consoles, too many poor games and cheaper home computers took home video game revenue down by almost 97% between 1983 and 1985, and Atari buried unsold stock in a landfill in New Mexico. In Europe, where computers were the market, the crash hardly registered.

Timeline

  1. The Commodore 64 is shown at CES in Las Vegas
  2. ZX Spectrum, from £125our books on the ZX Spectrum →
  3. Commodore 64, $595our books on the Commodore 64 →
  4. MSX, a shared standard for many makers, is announced in Japan
  5. Nintendo Family Computer (Famicom) in Japan
  6. The video game crash begins in America
  7. The millionth ZX Spectrum is built
  8. Amstrad CPC 464, with the cassette deck built in
  9. Elite on the BBC Micro: whole galaxies generated from a few numbers

Chapter III

1985–1989

Sixteen bits, and the consoles return

The middle of the decade brought computers built around the Motorola 68000, and a Japanese console that rebuilt the American market.

On 23 July 1985, at Lincoln Center in New York, Commodore presented the Amiga, and Andy Warhol made a portrait of Debbie Harry on it, live on stage. Behind the show were custom chips that moved graphics and played sampled sound by themselves, and a palette of 4,096 colours. The Amiga 500 brought it home in 1987, at $699 or £499, and became the best-selling model of the family. The Atari ST, out the same year as the first Amiga, had MIDI ports on the back and ended up in music studios.

In October 1985 Nintendo tested its console in New York, renamed the Nintendo Entertainment System and sold with a toy robot to persuade wary shops it was more than a video game. Within three years the American market had recovered: by 1988 it was worth more than $2.3 billion a year, 70% of it Nintendo’s. Sega answered with the Master System, which by 1990 was the best-selling console in Europe, and in 1988 with the Mega Drive.

On the computers, a new art form grew out of piracy. Crackers signed the games they cracked with short intros; by 1986 groups were competing to make the most impressive ones on the C64, and the demoscene was born. On the Amiga it became a culture of its own, with parties, competitions and programs that made the hardware do what its designers had not planned. Finland, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden and France have since put it on their national lists of intangible cultural heritage.

Timeline

  1. The Amiga is unveiled at Lincoln Centerour books on the Amiga →
  2. Atari ST, with MIDI ports built in
  3. Nintendo Entertainment System, test launch in New York
  4. Sega Mark III in Japan, later the Master System
  5. The first demo groups compete on the C64
  6. Amiga 500, $699 or £499our books on the Amiga →
  7. The Master System reaches Europe
  8. Sega Mega Drive in Japan
  9. American video game sales pass $2.3 billion a year

Chapter IV

1990–1994

The end of an era

By the early nineties the PC and the new consoles had taken over, and the home computer era ended — a few years later in Europe than in America.

In the United States, cheaper IBM-compatible PCs and the 16-bit consoles emptied the home computer shelves by the early nineties. In Europe the machines held on: in those years more than 80% of Commodore’s revenue came from European sales, and the C64 and the Amiga were still in the shops.

The consoles fought a war of their own. The Super Famicom arrived in Japan in November 1990 and in America in 1991, the year Sega gave the Mega Drive a mascot built for speed, Sonic the Hedgehog.

Commodore announced its liquidation on 29 April 1994, and the C64 went out of production with it. In December of the same year Sony launched the PlayStation in Japan: compact discs instead of cartridges, 3D polygons instead of sprites and tiles. Writing games was becoming a different job.

Timeline

  1. Super Famicom in Japan
  2. The SNES reaches America; Sonic the Hedgehog
  3. The Atari 2600 and the ZX Spectrum go out of production
  4. Amiga CD32, a CD console built on the Amiga
  5. Commodore is liquidated; the C64 goes with itour books on the Commodore 64 →
  6. Sony PlayStation in Japan

Our machines

The four we write about

All platforms →
Atari · 1977Atari 2600The hardest place to start, and the most honest one: 128 bytes, no screen memory, and a picture that exists only while your program is drawing it.1 book →Sinclair Research · 1982ZX SpectrumA Z80, a beeper and a screen where colour belongs to the 8×8 cell. A generation of British programmers learned the trade on it.1 book →Commodore · 1982Commodore 64Sprites, smooth scrolling, raster interrupts and the SID: the best-selling computer model ever, and a scene that still releases games and demos.5 books →Commodore · 1985AmigaCustom chips that draw, copy and play sound while the 68000 does something else: the machine the demoscene grew up on.1 book →

Side by side

The machines of the golden age

Eighteen consoles and home computers, in order of release, with the processor and the memory they had on the first day.

A small dictionary

Words of the era

Racing the beam
On the Atari 2600 there is no screen memory. The program rewrites the graphics registers while the television draws each line, and every instruction has to be counted in cycles to arrive in time. Atari 2600 →
Attribute clash
On the ZX Spectrum colour belongs to 8×8 cells, not to pixels. When two coloured objects share a cell, one of them takes on the other’s colours. ZX Spectrum →
Sprite
A small picture the video chip draws over the background by itself, at any position. The C64 has eight in hardware, and a program can reuse them further down the screen. Commodore 64 →
Raster interrupt
The video chip interrupts the processor when the beam reaches a chosen line, so the program can change colours, scrolling or sprites halfway down the screen. Commodore 64 →
Copper and blitter
Two helpers inside the Amiga. The copper waits for positions of the beam and writes chip registers; the blitter copies and combines blocks of memory while the 68000 does something else. Amiga →
Type-in listing
A program printed in a magazine or a book, for readers to type in line by line. One wrong character, and the game did not start.
Bedroom coder
A teenager writing and selling games from home, on a machine bought for homework. The British games industry started with thousands of them.
Demo
A program written only to show what the machine can do: music, effects, no game. Born from the intros of cracked games, it became the demoscene.

Why we still write about them

Small enough to understand completely

A modern computer is too large for one person to know. These machines are not: every register is documented, every cycle can be counted, and a whole game fits in a few kilobytes you can read from the first byte to the last. Learning them teaches what every programmer still uses — memory, timing, the cost of each instruction — with nothing in between.

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Dates and figures come from the encyclopedia articles on each machine and event, checked in October 2026. Where the sources disagree, the page gives a range or leaves the number out. All the names of companies and machines on this page are trademarks of their owners and are used only to tell their history.