Home Computers of the 1970s and 1980s Quiz

Answer: Commodore 64

Released in August of 1982, the Commodore 64 initially sold for $595 in the United States. According to the Guinness World Records, as of 2014, it was the highest selling computer model of all time. From 1983 to 1986, it cornered over 30% of the share of the U.S. market for home computers.

Answer: Apple MacIntosh 128K

With an introductory price of almost $2,500, the computer was costly for the market. It came with a built-in 9-inch screen and a mouse. The 128K referred to its 128 kilobytes of built-in RAM. The Macintosh 512K would become known as the "fat Mac," while the 128K would be referred to as the "thin Mac."

Answer: BBC Micro

The term "BBC Micro" is typically used to collectively refer to models A, B, B+64, B+128, Master 128, and Master Compact. The introductory price for the BBC Micro Model A was 225 pounds. Nicknamed "the Beeb," the BBC Micro was built for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Computer Literacy Project by the Acorn Computer company. By 1986, around 80% of British schools had at least one BBC microcomputer.

Answer: IBM Personal Computer 5150

While the term personal computer (PC) had been in use since at least 1972, after the release of the International Business Machines (IBM) Personal Computer, the term PC became synonymous with IBM-compatible computers. Running on Intel 8088 at 4.77 MHz, the 5150 came with either a floppy disk or cassette system.

The later 5160 model was the first IBM PC to come standard with an internal hard drive.

Answer: Coleco Adam

The Adam was originally advertised at $525, but between production and shipment, the price increased to $725. It experienced numerous technical problems, including many returned, defective computers. The 80 kilobyte RAM computer came with the "Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom" video game.

Answer: Amiga 500

The monitor ran buyers an extra $300. The Amiga 500 was discontinued in 1996 and used AmigaOS on Kickstart as its operating system. Four to six million units were sold, making the Amiga 500 one of the leading home computers of the late 1980s.

Answer: Tandy TRS 80

Released on August 3, 1977, the Tandy TRS 80 (later the Model I) was discontinued in 1981. It was one of the earliest mass marketed home computers, and over 100,000 were sold by the end of 1979 through the Tandy Corporation's Radio Shack stores. The name is an abbreviation for the Tandy/RadioShack Z80 microprocessor.

Answer: Apple IIe

Apple quickly made inroads into the American public school classroom through its offer of free computers. A few years earlier, in 1978, it had won a contract with Minnesota Education Computing Consortium to supply schools in that state with 500 computers.

In 1982, Steve Jobs lobbied his Congressional Representative to draft HR 5573 (the Computer Equipment Contribution Act), which would allow charitable contribution income tax deduction for corporations donating computers to "qualified educational organizations." However, in recent years, Apple has begun to lose its place in the American classroom.

In 2017, Chromebooks accounted for 58 percent of computing devices shipped to schools.

Answer: Osborne 1

Despite the heavy weight, this computer was considered to be somewhat portable. It had a tiny 5-inch display, dual floppy drives, 64k of RAM, and a 4 MHz CPU. The company declared bankruptcy in 1983 after the press leaked information about the next-generation Osborne.

This gave birth to the term "the Osborne effect," which suggests that if you announce a better, future product, people might stop buying the current version to wait for the new version, thus creating cashflow problems.

Answer: Kenbak-1

John V. Blankenbaker of the Kenbak Corporation invented the Kenbak-1, and it was first sold in 1971 for $750. That would be over $4,800 as of December 2019, according to the CPI Inflation Calculator. Fifty of these machines were built, and, as of 2019, fourteen were believed to still be in existence worldwide.

The 8-bit Kenbak-1 was based on small-scale integration TTL chips and had 256 bytes of memory.