[TulliusCicero]

This is just 20/20 hindsight. To most people back then it didn't feel completely revolutionary, because it was still niche and pretty limited in what computers could do.

VR might be revolutionary, but we won't know until after several more years, when it's either gone mainstream or clearly stalled out. I know there are people who will immediately nitpick that VR isn't revolutionary, which is ironic because this happens any time there's a nascent potentially revolutionary technology about: people nitpicking that it's not good enough yet, or arguing that it's not compelling (which is often just because it's not mature enough yet).

You don't know if anything's actually revolutionary until it's mature and saturated the market, but by then it's not really new anymore, so it's easy to dismiss it as old hat. By the time smartphones had percolated down to the point where even working-class randos had them, we'd had iOS and Android for several years, and of course earlier forms of smartphones for several years or more before those.

For a long time they were dismissed as mere "toys for techies" with limited real-world application for the regular person. Which was true, until it suddenly wasn't.

[TheOtherHobbes]

No, it absolutely did feel revolutionary.

People had seen computers running corporate departments and calculating orbits for NASA. Suddenly they were told they could have one too. At home.

The fact that it didn't do much was part of the fun, because it meant you had to master the technology to make it usable.

So it was a double pitch - personal power, personal mastery.

Modern computing doesn't offer that. It's all about playing in someone else's sand pit. Whether it's FB/Twitter, the app store, or an Amazon drop shipping business, or an ad-funded entertainment site, or a side project on GitHub - you're working inside an environment imposed on you by others, which you can't change and don't own.

You could say "How is that different to BASIC?" The difference is that using BASIC never felt like being part of someone else's machine. It was your tool, you could what you liked with it. There was no sense of being a cog in a factory which printed money for other people.

[sime2009]

> So it was a double pitch - personal power, personal mastery.

Maybe that is how you experienced it as a computer nerd like myself, but that was not the pitch.

For business it was computers for all just like the big boys. For families it was prepare your kids for this new computer oriented world. For us kids it was play computer games at home without having to stick coins into a machine at the mall. But us kids had to play the education angle on our parents who had credit cards. :-)

[sime2009]

No, it absolutely did feel revolutionary.

Until then only big companies could afford a computer to manage their data and accounting, etc. Microcomputers changed that and made the hardware available to every company.

VisiCalc on the software side was the killer app that relatively normal people could learn and use to improve their business work. Spreadsheets were certainly a revolution.

On the home front, affordable microcomputers arrived and it was widely recognised that the revolution was here. Computers were the future and every parent should get one to prepare their kids (ok, sons) for it. This explains the marketing around microcomputers being for families.