[chewyfruitloop]

Yeh $1500 computers.... you where looking at the wrong thing. Everyone else was looking at the not Microsoft market... commadore, Atari etc. I bought my first computer with Christmas money when I was about 10 for under £100 in the mid 80's. The whole girls weren't into computers is looking at the bubble from the inside and not looking at why there's a bubble. Parents in the 70's tended to point the boys at building and engineering toys and the girls at dolls etc. Those children followed on in the same fashion. That's left us in the gender bias we have now. As for ethnic groups... that's complicated and depends on local demographic, plus imigant families tend not to be overflow in spare cash....

[CoolGuySteve]

The video game crash of the early 80s put a stop to those cheap programmable computers. By the 90s, any cheap home computer, like the NES/SNES/Genesis/Gameboy was not programmable by the end user.

When I was a kid, I learned BASIC on a 10 year old Tandy 80 to write games like I had on my NES (which was marketed solely to boys btw). Eventually my dad dropped $2000 on a 486 (and subsequent upgrades) and that's when I was able to start writing C with the DJGPP toolchain, installing Linux, rebuilding machines out of spare obsolete parts, etc.

If my family wasn't well off, there's no way I'd have progressed past having known BASIC for a couple of summers.

I think this is a common refrain for anyone born between about 1980 and maybe 1995. By 2010, there were cheap laptops, netbooks, and whatnot.

[webvictim]

My family weren't at all well off when I was growing up in the UK, but my Dad had some contacts in a local IT business who had a spare BBC microcomputer that he got hold of around 1988 when they were throwing it away.

I was born at the end of 1984 and played games on it with him from around age 3, then started tinkering myself and learning how to load games and play them at around age 5. In another couple of years I was going to the library and checking out books full of lengthy game listings in BASIC, painstakingly typing them in, running them and saving them to tape. That experience basically ignited my love for computers and for programming. When the family managed to get a cheap PC I was about 9 or 10 and I spent as much time on there as I could, learning how to use MS-DOS 5, Windows 3.1 and playing games.

After this point I scrounged whatever hardware I could - I acquired an old IBM 286 with an EGA monitor that a local school wanted to get rid of, various other components, borrowed software off friends to copy the disks, etc. My parents were pretty supportive and at age 13 they were a little better off - I persuaded them to get me my own PC as a joint birthday and Christmas present, using an old monitor and peripherals we already had. I got access to the internet and started viewing the source of web pages, copying the HTML, learning what it did and editing it to make my own pages. I started to learn CSS, how to edit images and how to write Perl.

The story goes on and on - I'm mostly just going on a bit of a ramble about my past and fondly remembering all the experiences I had. The point is that yes, if your family is absolutely on the breadline while you're growing up then you probably won't have access to this stuff, but we were by no means upper middle class and I managed to get a great start with computing. It's mostly about passion and people looking out for you. I scrounged so much old hardware and software from people who didn't want it any more because I knew it'd be a fantastic learning experience, and I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged me to do this and didn't spend the _entire_ summer telling me to go outside and "do something".

[chewyfruitloop]

I'm not sure you got the entire impression of what was going on in the early 90's and late 80's then. There was a massive scene in the Amiga and Atari ST market.... over here we also had the Spectrum and Amstrad things in the mid 80's with the BBC Micro too. The cheap home computer era only really came to a crashing halt once Windows 95 got bedded in. In 95 I'd just started Uni and there was still a large user base on the Amiga and Atari ST. I've intentionally not mentioned Apple here... as they have never been called cheap....

[300bps]

I had the same reaction to the pricing in the article. I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas 1982. I think it was a few hundred dollars at most.

I got it because I begged my parents to buy it for me. My two older sisters had zero interest. None whatsoever. I spent 12 hours a day on it especially after I got my first 300 bps modem in 1985.

[Avernar]

I got mine for Christmas and it was $300 just for the computer. The floppy drive was another $300. Got the monitor which was another $300 about six months later.

Add in the dot matrix printer and 1200 baud modem and it was over $1000 for the complete system.

[abecedarius]

It cost about $1500 in today's money. Not-rich families would buy one for their kids, but it was a nontrivial expense to them.

My first computer was a TI-99/4A at about half that, and I was grateful.