[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.