A journey in France computer Times : 1980 - 2000 Micro computers show up in France in the early 1980s with a lot of 8 bit systems. With a central position in Europe, France has received computer from all different countries. We had computer from UK (sinclair, acorn, amtrad, tangerine..), France (Philips, Matra, thomson...), USA (Apple, Atari, Commodore, Texas Instrument...), Japan (MSX). Few of these system received support for editors so you may end up with a machine you could only program with (in basic). Thanks to weekly available magazine such as Hebdogiciel, you had every week a lot of listing to enter into your computer. The Apple II was only available for small business, computer lab, university. With a price around $2000, it could not compete with personal computer sold around $500. The Amstrad sold very well due to its low price, clear graphic (160*200 16 colors, no conflict), integrated monitor and its large support from the editors. The 16 bits area started in 1985 with the arrival of the Atari ST, followed with the Amiga, the Apple IIgs and finally the Archimede. Around 1988, the 8 bit was over and everyone had switched to the Atari St or the Amiga. Apple IIgs (10000 sold) and Archimede were considered as niche computers. Atari ST and Amiga were sharing the same kind of Monitor, printer, disk drive, joystick, modem, mouse... They both were very successufull with a huger support from european editors (both have more than 2000+ games and hundreds of demo). The PC & Compatible and the Macintosh were non existent for home usage due to lack of multimedia capability for the PC (no sound, no graphic, no joystick, no game...) and a very high price ($3000 for the Macintosh). The area of the 16 bits ends up aroud 1995 with the raise of the PC & Compatible as 'can do everything' machines. The games like Wing Commander or Doom showed that CPU power was now more imporant than dedicated chips (blitter). The high graphic resolution with VGA (who said naked pictures CD disk ?) and the begining of the Web pushed the 'old' 16 bits guys to retirement.