[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.