Probably both, to some extent, but would owning a computer in 1985 be cause for universal butt-kissing, or universal butt-kicking. LOL  ;D

Somewhere in between. Not "must own" I think, but not just for geeks.

Somewhere in between. Not "must own" I think, but not just for geeks.


You also have to remember, that while gadgetery was cool in the 80s, the main function of computers was more mundane, utilitarian functions like printing out accounting balancing sheets, or accessing data-bases. Gaming only really came to the computer scene in a big way in the late 80s.

My guess:

For pleasure, pre-1986: Geeky, unless you're a yuppie.
For pleasure, post-1986: Yuppie gadgets.

Somewhere in between. Not "must own" I think, but not just for geeks.



Yeah, I agree. Computers weren't really a must own in the '80s. Even though that started to change a bit in the late '80s.

in the early 80s i think it was mostly geeks and eggheads who had computers. it was the graphical user interface that changed it all, before that computer users tended to be perceived as kinda antisocial cuz you pretty much had to sit around in the dark all day learning how to use them. (i say this as one of the dark-sitters, until i discovered the wonders of girls and marijuana and the electric guitar.)

Pretty much for geeks only until the C-64 came out. 

The line between "thing geeks play with" and "cool gadget" was pretty much defined by the amount of gaming software you could find on the shelf, and whether or not the users of a particular machine spent more time playing other people's games on it, or programming their own games on it.  (I was a geek.  And proud of it.)

If you owned anything you had to build yourself (Heathkit, Imsai, Altair, etc), you were definitely a geek.

If you owned a VIC-20, or TI-99/4A, TRS-80, or Commodore PET series of computer, you were probably a geek. 

If you owned an Apple ][+, //e, or //c, you were a geek.  (Or your parents had paid $2000+ for a very expensive game system.  Great programming environment, though.  Woz and Jobs built the thing with the expectation that every user could, and should, be able to program their own machine to do anything they wanted it to, and/or build their own hardware for it, in your own basement.)

If you owned an Atari 400 or Atari 800, you were a geek, but you were a geek with the best bang-for-the-buck gaming system on the planet until the C-64 came out.  All the Atari "arcade" games were available, at much better quality than they were on the Atari 2600 game console of the era.

If you owned a Commodore 64, you were either a geek or not, depending on how much programming you did compared to how much gaming you did.  It was a decent system for programming, and a great system for playing games.

If you owned a PC or PCJr, you were probably a geek.  The C-64 was by far the better gaming platform.  The PC was a better piece of hardware, but had poor graphics and sound capabilities, and it was relatively hard to figure out what was going on under the hood.  The segmented architecture of the 8086/8088 was a headache to program for, in comparison with the simplicity of the Z80, 6502, and 6809-based 8-bit machines.

(And if you said something like that in public, and everyone agreed with you, you weren't just a geek, all your friends were geeks, too.)