[phil21]

In the early 90s it depended vastly on your demographic in my neck of the woods (Minneapolis). I read that comment largely nodding in agreement.

First you had to be able to afford one, even second hand 286's in the early 90's were a moderate expense for many families.

I was absolutely the abnormal one of my peer group in school when I had pre-existing computer knowledge from home for "computer class". Certainly the only one at all into gaming on it, other than friends enjoying coming over to play random games at times.

Entering high school in the mid-90's there were only maybe a half dozen to dozen kids who you could remotely describe as "PC Gamers" - but plenty of console folks who you could at least talk with. Only a small handful who regularly used BBS' or knew what a MUD was or the like.

I think for "most houses had a PC by then" might be accurate for houses with school-age children (as it was a powerful meme by then you needed one for schoolwork), but I don't recall a single childless relative having one other than the hacker uncle who taught me. The vast majority of my peers who had PCs or Macs at home never really used them other than as-prescribed for word processing or whatnot - a lot lacked the hardware (math coprocessors, sound card, a bit later graphics accelerators) to really interest most kids when they had been exposed to arcades and the NES by then.

It rapidly shifted around 93-95 or so, but the years fly by so I could be off a couple. I remember distinctly going from being the only one who had ever heard of the Internet to being asked daily about how to get hooked up. Crazy rates of change compared to today's relatively stagnant industry.

[alar44]

My experiences are similar, though I lived in Packer country. I was very middle/lower middle class, and by 96, I would say most homes had PCs and started seeing some AOL installs, and by 2000 or so, most also had internet.

Late 80s however, the most advanced computers I'd see were parents that used them for work (developers and accountants) and Atari/Commodore 64.

Prices started dropping rapidly around 1990, and specs went explosively through the roof.

A great time to be alive, for sure.

[buran77]

> and by 96, I would say most homes had PCs

Only ~35% of US households had a computer in 1997 [0]. Goes to show that your particular surroundings can easily skew your view of the situation.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/Apr/wk1/art01.htm

[alar44]

Right, throw out seniors and households below the poverty line and I bet that number shoots to like 85%. The avg/median person very likely had a PC in 97.

[buran77]

There's quite a bit wrong with that statement.

If you just discard the data you don't like you will indeed end up only with the numbers you like. To turn the 35% into 85% you eliminated 60% of the households from the statistic.

The average or median person (household?) may have had one but it was still just 35%. So if you lived in a place with few old or poor people and the feeling that "everyone had a computer" was justified, it would just show how biased such anecdotes are. Because it means somewhere else a twice as many people lived surrounded only by the rest of the households where there were almost no computers at all. And in the "early 90s" the ratio was closer to 1:5.

> Goes to show that your particular surroundings can easily skew your view of the situation.

[Forgeties79]

It’s hard to truly capture how revolutionary Doom was when it dropped in ‘93. One could argue categorizing PC gaming history as “before/after Doom” the same way people say pre/post [major historic event usually a war].