Tape drives were such an awkward phase of home computing.
Plus 5.25 disks were a bitch to work with.
Look at Mr. Moneybags over there with his fancy disk drive. Most of us normal people have to use tape you know.
Well I didn't. I skipped that entire awkward phase of early home computing and went right to 16 bit and disk drives because this was the future.(tm) With the early years of home computing it's important to see the frame of reference. It's easy to forget these days but computers were all business usually and totally were a niche enthusiast product for the private consumer, not mainstream. Kinda like something like VR now. You'd have to drop a lot of money upfront and you'd get something that might turn out to be a deadend with an uncertain future if it's gonna be a thing or not in three years still. Common consensus in the 80s was as a normal person, you did not need a computer and private people getting one very well might be one of these out-there fads that time was full of. In the 80s most of the west (with some exceptions, e.g. parts of the UK) had sort of a golden age. There was a very healthy middle class, lots of disposable income. This brought on a lot of fads because people could drop stacks of money on things like computers without it really hurting them. How many people today can e.g. drop several thousand on some VR setup and have their bank account forget two months later that that ever happened? Some of you here might be able to do that but you have to admit that it's not the common experience.
Then there was the C64 which was supposed to be cheap. When people bought an Amiga or PC because that smooth salesman in the store convinced them they totally need one they sometimes were kidding themselves that they could do their taxes on them, or write letters, or something.. eventually either unloading it on the male kid (usually the only family member who showed any interest after that "new stuff" phase) or having it in the living room as the "family computer" depending on how much that expense hurt. The C64 was cheap enough to be a gift to that kid outright. Kids play videogames. It's not a strech. That said, I knew a lot of people who used C64 productively. I had a friend who picked up tons of C64s, took the mainboard out and basically used it together with custom EPROMS as a neolithic Rasperry Pi to automate things for small companies. He made a lot of money way into the 90s.
I also used my computer productively and there things were a bit different from the gaming world, a lot of these applications were quite good and newer iterations brought surprisingly little to the table sometimes. When I explore old systems these days, I often look at old applications, not at games. I found quite a few pearls which are still completely usable these days. (there's only so many ways you can write a document in, do pixel art or do a spreadsheet)
I both bought and copied a lot of software back then. I had boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of disks, and also entire drawers full. Had my own sorting and priority system and everything, since if anything ever got misplaced in that heap - barring some incredible luck - it was GONE. I still only had a percentage of the games you see in "the 100 best Amiga/PC games" compilations, and in fact, I never even heard of many of them. I also barely ever finished a game or even got far into them, for that matter. A lot of it was garbage and even the more interesting games weren't all that interesting. Games, besides some very few and notable exceptions, just didn't have the depth they do now. I was also never really a fan of arcade games 9which often were only a poor rip-off anyways) and liked the more out-there stuff. Strategy games had a bit more staying power.
most games had no way to save the progress, and the only way to resume game from some point was to pause it, and leave the computer on (and turn off tv).
If you were serious about your gaming, you used to have something like the action replay for the amiga, a hardware expansion that basically allowed you to dump the state of the system to persistent memory and continue playing later where you left. It worked pretty well and also allowed you to poke around in the memory of the system, editing values, ripping sprites/music and generally figuring out what made the game tick. It's today talked about as a cheating device almost exclusively, but it wasn't only that at all.
