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liam_on_linuxAnother Quora answer.
I can’t say. My family was not rich enough to afford such high-end computers that cost £thousands. Only Americans could.
In early-1980s Britain we had Sinclair, Commodore and Oric computers (e.g. the ZX Spectrum or C64.) The better-off had Acorn machines. (There were many other more obscure brands.)
Common problems?
Well, mass storage was too expensive for children & home users. No floppy disks. Programs were stored on cassette tapes and loaded at 1200 baud or less. Loading a game could take 5 or 10 minutes.
It was common for computer magazines to print listings for you to type in yourself. This is how I learned programming. A big program could take days to type in, so an ever-present danger was the computer overheating and crashing, or someone accidentally unplugging it, and you losing all that work.
You saved to tape periodically. This could take 5–10 min again. The computers used ordinary audio cassette players. That means no automated control. No seek function. No directory listings. One program per side, and lots of hand-labelled tapes.
Audio tape is not a reliable medium. You could save hours of work and have it refused to load the next day.
Even professionally-duplicated tapes suffered this, especially if you played the game a lot so the tape got worn. “Tape loading errors” were a common nightmare.
Some manufacturers offered optional disk controllers for more serious users, e.g. adults with more money. However, every make and model had its own disk format: a Commodore 64 could not not read disks from a BBC Micro, and neither could read disks from a PC. Commodore disk drives used a serial interface and so were excruciatingly slow.
Sinclair aimed at the budget end of the market and invented its own medium, the Sinclair Microdrive: ZX Microdrive - Wikipedia
This was a form of stringy floppy: Exatron Stringy Floppy - Wikipedia
Also derived from an audio medium, as the mass market made the tech cheaper. In this case, 8-track cassettes: 8-track tape - Wikipedia
I had these before I saved up for a disk interface and a single 5¼” drive as a university student. Each microdrive cartridge stored under 100 kB. Access took tens of seconds, but was still an order of magnitude or more faster than cassettes, which took tens of minutes.
They were slow, small, unreliable, and failure-prone, but better than anything else for the price.
As these machines were very slow, and lacked enough storage to usefully run compilers, to get enough performance for games, programmers worked in machine code. Magazines published these too. This might mean typing in 4, 5 or 6 pages of numbers:
So instead of typing in this, which was at least meaningful and could be followed:
You had to type in pages of this:
Your Computer (David Horne’s ZX-81 1K Chess, February 1983.)
This is a notably short program: only 3 pages or so. It plays chess in 1000 bytes of total space, a notable achievement that is famous: 1K ZX Chess - Wikipedia
Try to imagine typing in 30–40 thousand characters of code, where a single mistaken character renders the entire thing useless. When buying a new game might cost £10 or £15, an amount of money that could take 6 months to save up, a week of evenings after school spent typing was worth doing.
This, note, on terrible keyboards that resembled a cheap pocket calculator:
No space bar. No cursor keys or delete key. Each key performing 5–6 different functions depending on which other keys were held down.
This is the machine I learned to code on; I spent years typing on this exact keyboard.
No hard disk. No floppy disks. No directly-accessible storage. Everything in RAM, so one second of power fluctuation and hours of work irretrievably lost.
This machine, with 48 kB of RAM, cost as much as a cheap ChromeBook new today. No monitor: you used a TV set, so the picture was fuzzy and unstable. The cassette player cost extra.
And you know what? We all absolutely loved it, and we miss it still today. :-)
