One thing to understand is that, for home computers, the processing power was nearly free, but the storage (RAM and disk) were brutally expensive. An 8 or 16-b

One thing to understand is that, for home computers, the processing power was nearly free, but the storage (RAM and disk) were brutally expensive. An 8 or 16-bit home-computer from the early '80s could execute more instructions per second than a PDP-10 from 10-15 years ago, but had less RAM (Most 8-bit systems had no more than 64k, and the original IBM 5150 maxed out at 256k[1]) and was probably limited to a cassette or floppy disk for storage (no hard drive). So when you see e.g. demos of SymbOS[2] running on an MSX2 (which at 1985 barely qualifies as "early 80s") with a 1MB ram expansion, it's not really the sort of thing that people would have had at home in the early 80s. 1: The PC was offered in configurations as low as 16k, models with less than 64k were fairly quickly discontinued. 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SymbOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SymbOS