In Hungary, the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum became available around 1985, but they were very expensive. If you wanted one, it was cheaper to ask for a “blue passport” to travel to Austria (you could visit the West once every three years), change Forints to Schillings on the black market, buy one in Vienna, then smuggle it home under the gas tank of your car to avoid import duties.
A Hungarian home computer, the [Videoton TVC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWkRs0gvbmE) came out in 1986, but it was almost as expensive as the C64, had lower specs and was more prone to errors, so it wasn’t very successful.
Importation of computers became somewhat more common from 1988 when free travel to the West was introduced, but computers in the home didn’t become widespread until the late 90s.
Hungary was connected to the internet in 1993, when the COCOM list banning certain Western technologies from East Bloc countries was abolished, and internet in the home became common around 10 years later in 2003.
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1981 for me, I think there were half a dozen more at my school that had a zx81 and then the spectrum was much more popular, commodore pet in school then the BBC micro. Amiga was a niche but significant, with Amstrad, I don’t think I saw an apple computer until about 1990
I got my first PC for Christmas in 2000. We were one of the first people where I live to have PC(Win 98), I only saw one ancient Apple before.
But soon after basically 2001-2005 a lot of people started to buy PC, since they became much more affordable. PC techlogy was going crazy fast forward, I had 10 GB HDD in my first PC, but in 2003 people already had PC with 120 GB HDD. I still remember I was like wow, what are you gonna put there, it’s so much space lol. So ofc I just had to use all my saved money to buy new PC, which was like 10 times more powerful than my current one(at least the CPU, I don’t remember everything about it) and like 5 times more cheaper.
Internet at home was not very common until late 2000’s/early 2010’s. I still remember when I got my internet connection at home before Christmas 2006. I was like one of 5 people who had it(out of 30) in my high school class. Dial-up was awful(many people did not have regular phones and had mobile phones instead) and most got internet when wi-fi became popular.
Ofc this were just my experiences, I can’t speak for whole country lol.
They started popping up in the early 80s in the UK. My uncle got a Sinclair ZX80 as soon as it was available (1980) and by 1984 pretty much everyone I knew had something – wealthier friends had Apples (IIe), Commodore 64s, or BBC B micros. But pretty much all my friends had something like a Vic 20 or a ZX Spectrum for games.
Interestingly, I didn’t know anyone with an IBM PC back then. But many schools had PCs in their computing labs – my dad was a teacher, and occasionally I would get to sit in the computer room and play Chuckie Egg!
>When did people start having computers in their homes in your country?
Early 90s, and not many had them since they were very expensive.
>When did they become widespread?
Early 00s. I personally got my first PC around 2008 (9 years old), for school. By that time there was a huge selection already, and many specialized stores even in provincial towns.
A friend of my brother got an Amstrad CPC-6128 and the associated printer back in 1987? 1988? Another friend got a 6128+ in 1990. One of my classmates had an Amiga. I got my first PC in the mid 1990ies I think to write my master’s dissertation ot whatever a “mémoire de maîtrise” was called in english.
For people who didn’t need a computer for work, they started to become commonplace after the [Home PC Reform of 1997](https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hem-PC-reformen).
The goverment and many businesses wanted to increase the computer literacy among the workforce.
So they offered tax-free leasing programs where you could rent a computer for 3 years. Most people bought it after the leasing period.
Between 1998 and 2001 about 1 million Swedes gained access to a home computer, or 10% of the population, during this time.
I think we went through 3–4 computers this way, until I bought and assembled my own in around 2010.
The first PC computer in Sweden aimed for the broader public came in 1984. It was Ericsson that made their Step/One computer. We got a C64 in 1984, the C64 was a publicly subsidized computer that the unions and the employer organisations together helped finance for all the union members. Then we got our first pc (a Step/One) in 1986.
People seriously started getting computers already in the 80s, especially the commodore 64, 128 and Amigas had a lot of users in the beginning, but computers weren’t super common until the early 90s when the PC gained popularity.
I got my first computer, a C64, in the early 90s I think, I can’t remember exactly when, but I later got my first PC in 1994. When I got the 64 I think only one uncle had a 128 and another had an Amiga, that was all. By the time I got the PC a lot more of my family members and friends had gotten PCs, so a lot was happening in the early 90s.
In the early/mid 90s I would have to visit some of the older kids, but I wasn’t old enough anyway. By the end of the 90s most boys in my class had a computer they could use at home. My/our first was a Aptiva with Win95.
By 2001/2002 most of my class (girls and boys) were on IRC in the evenings. But older kids were on IRC a lot in the late 90s if I remember correctly.
We had a PC in our home for as long as I remember (born in 1990). Dad usually got them from work. I’m grateful because having to run games in DOS gave me a little head start when learning Linux terminal commands many many years later in uni.
My parents never got us individual computers though, as some other I knew. We had the family PC. My parents were also very much against broadband so we got it in 2005 IIRC.
My family had a toy 8-bit computer since the late 80s. Pravetz 8D, Bulgarian-made, design largely stolen from a British personal computer brand. It came with a book with BASIC programs you had to manually type in, and it could also read data from an audio cassette.
Got my first real PC in 2001, a rustic IBM Pentium 3 with 128 MB of RAM and NVIDIA Riva. I was probably one of the first kids in my class to own one.
My father had a job in IT, and he bought a Commodore 64 in Vienna in 1984 exactly the way OP described, so when I was born, we already had a computer at home. He bought an XT PC with a Hercules monochrome monitor in like 1991; and then a 486 with VGA in 1993.