List of home computers

Today, the price of microcomputers has dropped to the point where there's no advantage to building a separate, incompatible series just for home users.

Single-board development or evaluation boards, intended to demonstrate a microprocessor, are excluded since these were not marketed to general consumers.

Pioneering kit and assembled hobby microcomputers which generally required electronics skills to build or operate are listed separately, as are computers intended primarily for use in schools.

School computers usually had facilities to share expensive peripherals such as disk drives and printers, and often had provision for central administration.

Popular machines inspired third-party sources for adapters, add-on processors, mass storage, and other peripherals.

In the Eastern Bloc countries, manufacturers made functional duplicates of Western microprocessors under different part number series.

Memory and TV bandwidth restrictions meant that typical home computers had only a few color choices and perhaps 20 lines of 40 characters of text as an upper limit to their video capabilities.

The home computer would contain some circuit such as a phase-locked loop to convert audio tones back into digital data.

Plug-in ROM cartridges containing game or application software were popular in earlier home computers since they were easier to use, faster, and more reliable than cassette tapes.

They were sometimes sold in kit form that required the user to insert and solder components in a printed circuit board.

Popular home computers of the period[clarification needed] were fitted with various types of network interfaces[clarification needed] to allow sharing of files, large disk drives, and printers, and often allowed a teacher to interact with a student, supervise the system usage, and carry out administrative tasks from a host computer.