[EvanAnderson]

My perspective (from near Dayton, Ohio, US, born in 1977) was that a significant number of people had home computers (a lot of Commodore 64's and VIC 20's, various TRS-80 models, some Atari 8-bit machines, some TI machines, a few Amiga machines, a scant few Apple II's and even fewer Macintosh machines) but most kids my age weren't using the machines significantly.

Kids might play a game here or there, or type a school paper on them, but that was mostly it. I went to a few of the local "computer club" meetings that were mostly attended by the stereotypical middle-aged "computer guy" (who I have now become... >sigh<). Doom was definitely "a thing" in the early 90s and started to bring some of the kids over into PC gaming. We had a small BBS scene, too, so that brought a few of the more computer-inclined kids into computing. (Of course, the ISPs moving in in 94-95 killed the BBS scene quickly.)

Game consoles-- the Atari 2600, NES, and SNES-- were the only significant interaction with computing devices at home that I saw. The "gaming scene", in the early 90s, was mostly about NES / SNES carts and arcade games (Mortal Kombat was a big deal).

I didn't got to a particularly well-funded public school so I saw Atari 8-bit, Apple II, and Mac LC machines there. Oh, and TI calculators, of course (but, sadly, mostly the TI-81... The '85 wasn't becoming "a thing" until I was in college).

[saltcured]

I'm a few years older than you. In my suburban schools in the S.F. Bay Area, many kids were producing any writing homework printed on home computers or word processors as soon as the teachers relented on requiring "cursive" handwriting. I think this began around the 4th or 5th grade and ramped up through middle school (so around 1983-1988 in my case).

Early on, the homework signaled which families had Apples and Macs with fancy printers that made an attempt at WYSIWG rendered fonts instead of grotty fixed font dot matrix. A lot of kids had Macs without techie parents but I suppose white-collar jobs or even some tradesmen who had made it to middle or upper-middle class. By high school PCs with Windows and laser printers were joining the fray. Marketing told parents this was good for their kids, and kids were aware of the wealth indicator too.

I feel like home computers were more office tools or educational rather than game platforms for most of my peers. I remember a subset of kids had games on VIC 20, C64, DOS PC, or Apple IIe/IIc in the mid 80s. By the late 80s we had more PC games, but many households already had dedicated Atari, Nintendo, or Sega set-top gaming. I think shareware and pirated game floppies did circulate further than just those who actually attended or even knew what a computer club or BBS might be.

[Forgeties79]

Yeah this is very much how I’d describe as well. Nintendo had captured ~90% of the console market in the late 80’s/early 90’s while consoles were basically THE way most people played video games.

There’s a great book called Console Wars if anyone is curious about the rise of Nintendo, Sega, etc. It can be a tad dry at times but overall the stories behind these companies are often compelling in their own right. It does a GREAT job of explaining early gaming at universities and how certain programs proliferated. The 70’s were fascinating - people saw what games could be but were all tripping over each other trying to figure out how to get there.