Home computer

The popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum used the Z80 microprocessor.

The home computer, home computer or home computer refers to the second generation of computers, which entered the market with the birth of the Altair 8800 and extends to the early 1990s. This encompasses all 8-bit computers (mainly with a Zilog Z80, MOS Technology 6502 or Motorola 6800 central processing unit - CPU) and the first wave of computers with 16-bit CPUs (mainly Motorola 68000 and Intel 8086 and 8088). The term comes from the fact that they brought the computer from industry to the home. Although IBM PC compatibles are usually excluded from this group, the truth is that until the final triumph and the adoption of the term "personal computer", they had to compete with the lines sponsored by Atari, Commodore and Apple Computer Therefore, some choose to include the most significant 16-bit models in the domestic category, or at least the compatible PCs aimed at the same market as the Tandy range.

In a way, keeping a certain resemblance to the new animal forms that appeared in the Cambrian period, a large number of machines of all kinds, including rarities like the Jupiter Ace computer in the Forth language, appeared on the market and disappeared again. Some types of computers stayed around longer, others evolved trying to maintain compatibility (there are, for example, Apple II emulation cards for early Macs). However, by the end of the decade most were phased out by the IBM-compatible personal computer and newer generations of game consoles because both used their own incompatible formats. The IBM revolution was sparked in 1981 by the release of the IBM 5150 personal computer, the IBM PC.

Commodore 64 with 16 colors and professional keyboard.

Despite this, there are still groups of users who do not give up using and improving their old equipment, providing them with modern possibilities such as a hard drive or Internet connection. Although they are all very active (taking into account the shrinking user base), the 8-bit MSX users and the 16-bit Commodore Amiga users stand out on their own merits (qualified by a MacByte editor as the villages of irreducible Gauls that resist the siege of the Wintel legions). They have also given rise to a series of hobbies that are usually included under the term retrocomputing.

One of the best known is the emulation, usually by software, but also by hardware, of these old computers and consoles in all kinds of devices: modern personal computers, consoles, PDAs, mobile phones, DVD players, DTT decoders, digital cameras, etc.

Many of these computers were superficially similar and often had a "cheaply made" keyboard built into the case that housed the motherboard with the CPU, an external power supply, and the most common display unit, a television. Many used compact audio cassettes as a (notoriously unreliable) data storage mechanism since floppy disk drives were very expensive at the time. Its low price was common to most computers.

Aside from cases like CP/M and OS-9, most have the basic routines (which could be considered their operating system) in ROM along with the BASIC language. It is what today is usually known as the firmware of the peripherals (a disk drive or DVD reader can have microcontrollers integrated into its circuitry precisely based on the CPUs of these computers).