... from reality

1982, sees an explosion of home computers onto the market. The world as we knew it was about to be changed forever. For lots of kids, this was 'escapism'.
In the real world, there were strikes, the news was filled with doom & gloom, Thatcher, Regan, Chernenko, the Ayatollah Khomeini, were never far from the headlines, neither were Polaris missiles, and the constant threat of nuclear war...
These little machines gave us kids a chance to switch off from the real work, and immerse ourselves in our own little worlds, fighting monsters, or working our way through underground caverns to get to level 20. It was more than that though. With these machines, you could write your own programs in BASIC (or Assembly if you were cool), and share them with friends at school. This was the humble beginning of the bedroom programmer, and some of today's large Software Studios began life here.
From here on in, computers would start to change the way we lived, interacted, to the point where we probably can't live without them. Try it. Try to stay off the computer, internet, mobile phone, social networking for a week. It's harder than you think it is!

The 'Escape' key was imaged from my Acorn Electron (1982).