I suspect some statistical weirdness going on in the precise formulation of the survey question.
I know for a fact 30M commodore 64s were sold in the 80s in the USA. Not all commodores, not all home computers, just the classic model C64, 30M units sold. That's in a country that used to only have 250M people, so in theory 12% of Americans as of 1990 had purchased one specific model, the C64, leaving only 3% for all other models combined, which seems very unlikely.
Some of those probably went to schools not homes, although schools were owned by Apple II in those days...
My suspicion is many of those were unused in basements and closets, or the question was phrased weirdly like "have you purchased a computer in the last three years" or "used a home computer in the last month" or they defined "home computer" to be "not an IBM (office) or Apple (school) product" or something like that.
Wikipedia says between 12m and 17m were manufactured, in total.
Trammel claimed 30m based on a remembered estimate of rough sales numbers per year, but the only estimate that’s based on objective evidence - serial number analysis - is 12.5m.
I would tend to believe the linked site's serial number analysis result of exactly 12.5M. The americans did something like that to the germans in WWII, it turns out a remarkably small totally random sample of sequentially assigned serial numbers is enough to very accurately predict the highest number sold. Assuming very random sampling, which is never truly random, of course.
Doesn't change the overall outcome, however, when there's a stat that a small segment of an industry is "about" the size of what's claimed to be the entire industry, something's off in the numbers.
A mere 12.5M sold remains 5% of the entire USA population at that time, and honestly, having been there, almost everyone I knew had a PC clone or some apple product, usually a mac. The number must be larger than 10%. "a computer" was required at college ... ed.gov claims there are 19.4 M college students in the USA right now and google claims 332M people in the USA right now, so about 6% of the population are in college right now, so back in 1990 guess "around" 6% of the population was required to own a computer just to attend higher ed ... the claimed 10% seems like an incredibly low number.
In 1990? No way. I was taking college courses (for HS credit) in 1990, and the first I heard of a requirement to bring your own computer was years after that.
Another thing that skews the numbers is that my household during the 80s had two Color Computers, a C64, and an Amiga 500, but no one else in my social circle had anything more general than a Nintendo or Atari console.
I was in college in the latter half of 1980s. Computers were very much in use at the time for writing papers, and some classes required them for other work. Students were not expected to actually own one, however -- they would go to labs around campus which were basially just rooms full of PCs loaded up with all the common software.
Computer Science courses generally just required a remote dumb terminal, such as a VT100 or ADM 3a. These were available in a few rooms around campus as well.
In UK universities at least, circa 1990 we had computer labs/rooms which were home to dumb terminals, or if you were lucky, Atari STs running a terminal emulator. Some of us brought our home computers to university, they were mostly Atari STs and Amigas - I actually lugged my Amstrad CPC6128 and colour monitor to campus, but never used it for course work as there was no networking in the dorm rooms. Some new-build rooms had it by 1990, and a few people had PCs linked to it by then, but only used as terminals to the mainframes and minis on the campus network.
One person on my course caused a minor stir by bringing a "laptop" to a lecture to take notes in about 1991 - the keyboard was so noisy that they only did it once!
I went to grad school for business in the mid-80s. I had a computer but I doubt there were more than a handful of other people in my class who had one. While I was there they went from a very limited computer lab in the basement with a few Macs, a Lisa!, and some DEC terminals to a much bigger lab of 286s off the library.
I was a freshman in nerd school in 1986. Out of the 8 frosh on my hall, only 2 had their own computers (I was not one of them). I don't think any of the seniors in the singles on the other side of the hall had computers either.
I graduated in 1990 and owning a personal computer capable of running a C or Pascal compiler useful for academic work was an impossible dream. I was lucky enough to have an Amiga, but a C compiler such as Aztec C cost serious money back then. Open source existed but GCC started out on Vax and even by 1990 I think it only ran on very expensive systems like Unix minis and workstations.
As late as the mid-90s in California, some kids showed up at university without a computer. There were PC and Mac labs on campus that were open pretty late, as well as VT100 terminal labs open 24/7 (though these were only used by most students to check email between classes and were on the way out).
Even in 2000 computers weren’t required - the school had a computer lab you could use if needed, and it was only a few years before that they had begun requiring essays and papers to be printed from a computer.
My sister had a “word processor” for college in the mid 90s, it did spreadsheet stuff and had a floppy drive and a monochrome monitor, maybe those count as a computer too?
when I went to school, each school usually had only one or 2 apple ][s -- but we had a whole classroom of PETs in 7th grade that got replaced by a classroom of C64 in 8th grade. I saved up and bought a TRS-80 CoCo 2, otherwise there would not have been a computer in our house.
Maybe. 15% sounds about right to me. Back in 1990 computers were expensive, bulky devices, required specialized knowledge to operate (Apple's ad copy notwithstanding), and had limited use outside of a few specific domains.
Kinda amazing that nowadays anyone can go to a store and get a "super" computer that fits in their pockets in the form of a smartphone. Want to video call someone across the world? Buy one of those, setup an account for the Apple/Google store (yay walled garden), install WhatsApp or your messenger of choice, and ring ring!
Funny how many of the ads say "Call us for more information about our offerings!" instead of a "For more info: www....".
We're talking about mass market adoption. Most people (by which I mean not-HN) weren't using acoustic-coupled modems over device-specific ports to dial into BBSs over long distance lines.
Computer control of modems using standardized Hayes(+) command sets over RS-232 serial ports (1981), the Bell breakup (1984) and subsequent competition, and increased modem manufacturer competition breaking price-per-baud standards and increasing affordability (~1988) were required enablers to take it mass market.
It took until the early 90s that you could (a) buy a PC at a reasonable price, (b) buy a modem at a reasonable price (that was guaranteed to work with your PC), (c) dial into an ISP's local number... from anywhere in the US.
Yes, some people lived in NYC, Chicago, SF, etc. and had access to knowledge and BBS infrastructure at local rates earlier than that, but most people didn't.
Only fifteen percent of American households had a computer in 1990.
People overestimate the speed of the spread of computers.
I didn't have a computer where I worked until 1994. And then, it was shared by eight people.
At my next job in 1995, I made them buy a computer for the office as a term of employment. At the time, I suggested that a laptop might be a good option, since the computer would be shared by three people. For the next two years, the sales guys made fun of me for wanting to put a computer, and for wanting one that fits on my lap.
I later heard that when I left, they sold the computer. I wonder how those blissfully computer-free sales guys are doing today.
When I worked for Westinghouse in 1996 was the first time I was in an office that has one computer per person. But not every department had computers at all. And most who did were just terminals hooked up to a Vax in accounting.
When I worked for a large regional media company in 1997, everyone had a computer. Only a couple of them had internet access, and that was only e-mail. This was during the days when so many people were getting AOL at home that it became uselessly bogged down by its own popularity.
1999: Everyone in the office had their own computer. Not everyone used them. But at least they all had internet access.
(OT: I'm sad that the macOS spell checker didn't know the word "Vax" just now)
Your comment is about business use of computers, not households. I worked at a Fortune 200 company and from 1985-1989 much of my job was helping roll out desktop computers and networking (including email) throughout our fairly large geographical territory. By 1990 I'd estimate conservatively that well over half of our office workers had their own networked PC on their desk.
I remember buying an AST 386 for my use at home, I'm guessing it cost about $4K or more in today's dollars, so it is true that business-class PCs at home were probably relatively rare at that time.
In 1995, I started replacing the WYSE VT-100 terminals at my small workplace with Pentium desktops, in order to prepare for the switch to client-server in the next ERP version. They averaged fron $2700/ea ($5100 today) data entry models, to $3500 for mine, to $5200 ($9800 today) for the mechanical engineering system. (I still have my notes.)
I know this isn’t relevant to the point about usage in 1990, but it shocks me (as somebody born in 1995) that over the course of 4 years you went from being ridiculed over demanding a computer to a computer on everyone’s desk. 4 years!
I remember in the late 80s most people could not type. Typing was done by secretaries and was a specialized skill. There were (optional) for-credit classes in high school dedicated to teaching typing and nothing else.
I got a bunch of part-time temp office jobs as a teenager because I could type fast, having grown up with computers, while my friends would get jobs at supermarkets or convenience stores, etc.
The temp agencies had me do typing tests (on typewriters, not computers) before placing me. I blew them away at some ungodly WPM speed that I no longer remember. Not atypical by todays standards, I’m sure, but standards were different then.
Often I would be the only person in a small office who could type. I certainly was the only male who could type. Everyone else was female.
One of the fun things about my mother was that as a teenager she'd been taught to type.
She grew up in roughly the same area where we lived when I was a kid, and so she actually want to a previous iteration of a girl's school I've visited in the 1990s, but back then as well as sex segregated selective education (ie my school was specifically for boys who "tested well" at age 12, hers was for girls who likewise tested well at age 12) the assumptions about future life roles were... very static. She wasn't doing well enough to be sent to University, so the assumption was she'd get a secretarial type job, and probably marry in her 20s, get pregnant and drop out of the work force.
So, they taught her to type. This is the 1960s, so she's not learning Word, she's learning how to use a manual typewriter, because it's expected she'll be in a typing pool, maybe a clerk, or at most a PA. She actually had very different ideas of what she'd do, and after finishing her course turned down a Computer Operator job because it wouldn't lead to what she was interested in - but in the end as predicted she ended up married, pregnant (with me) and giving up work in 1975.
Anyway, fast forward twenty years, my sister and I have "flown the nest" so to speak and money is tight, my father has been made redundant and will never have another white collar job for the rest of his life - so she gets an administrative job. Understandably they want somebody who can type, and she checks the box even though she's been out of the workforce for twenty years. Hasn't much idea how to use Word or indeed Windows, but she's fairly smart and can muddle along. It's interesting how unexpectedly that skill, which she didn't really value at the time, was crucial to her again.
Eventually the IT stuff was too much for her, and she took early retirement because both the extra IT training and the constant pressure to "do more with less" (the government likes the idea of a powerful military, but doesn't like spending money on it, she was an administrator for the Ministry of Defence) made it intolerable. But if she'd never learned typing as a teenager I think she'd have really struggled to find work with a "Homemaker gap" in her CV matching the IT revolution.
Well... I remember in 1996 when first working on the US west coast at a research institute that the prof. would have his admin assistant print-out emails; he would hand-write responses that the admin assistant would type into the computer :-D
I worked for a large computer systems company starting in the second half of the 80s. We had minicomputer based email all along--we made the computers and the software. But there were definitely execs who did likewise.
I took a similar typing test on a typewriter and managed to get in 65 words per minute for the required text, due to my time with computers.
But I barely passed, because there was no error correction allowed. No backspace key. Although business typewriters of the time often had the ability to let you correct at least one character, either by buffering a few keystrokes or with actual "white out" over-printing, it was just as common to find yourself working for someone with a cheap typewriter and a bottle of white paint.
That was 1988. Summer job temp placement office at hometown university.
I attended college far away, a place noted for its computer science department, where there were $20,000 workstations on campus for the department's students. I don't know how many students had their own machines in the dorm, but the ratio on our floor was 1/12.
Calculators had a similar trajectory. I used slide rules throughout high school. I needed a calculator for college and got a TI engineering calculator for probably something like $200 in mid-70s dollars. Got a probably discontinued HP a couple of years later for probably the same amount. Not sure how long before they were ubiquitous in the general population but probably not more than 5 years or so.
That's an interesting experience, because my family got our first home computer in about 1981, the kid down the street had one, and there was one in my first grade class around the same time. From then on, they were available in every school I attended, and my (rural Oregon) highschool in the early 90s had four computer labs - for programming, typing, newspaper layout, and CAD. My friend and I were watching AcidWarp on his 386 in about 1991. I had an Amiga at that point, and it was actually a bit of a relic even though it could blow my friend's PC out of the water for certain things. Our town library had a computer system and the office where my dad worked had a Data General mainframe they called the "DG". By 1993 I had a Linux box that I was running as a BBS, and I saw HTML for the first time in the Army in 1995. Then one day I stepped off a train at a random stop in Pusan, Korea in 1996 and some dude about my age walked up and said hi, and we ended up hanging out with his friends and they showed me a Mac with a web browser...and the world was never the same again.
Different contexts. Uptake in homes was swift. I had a home computer in 1982. But my comment was about computers in offices.
Businesses change slowly. Equipment doesn't get replaced on a whim. It has to be amortized and there's tax thingies that mean business equipment lifecycles are 3 to 5 years, minimum.
That's a good point. We had computers in our homes a lot of the time, and in schools I believe they were subsidized by tech companies like Apple. The 80s and 90s businesses that I got to see basically had antiquated mainframes and mini computers. The Army had PCs for office use, but the field equipment was VAX or (in the case of our anti-aircraft radar) some obscure form of Unix. That said, you still couldn't swing a cat without bumping it into a CRT.
In 1990, it would have been somewhat rare for a college student to own a computer, but there were computer labs everywhere on campus and you had an email address, so it was clear they a part of modern life. They were priced in the 'used car' range so it wasn't impossible to own one.
(edit this was for a 'real' PC compatible or Mac, you could probably find C64s and etc at the flea market.)
In my freshman year in 1993, I was the only person on my floor to haul a PC into the dorms. Across 4 buildings each with a dozen floors, there was maybe ten people who had computers in their room. The only reason I had one was because dad was an IBMer and he managed to obtain an XT 286 for me.
Same year, and every engineering and CS student I knew had one in their dorm room. The lowest spec I saw was 386SX-16 with 2 MB and the highest was 486DX-50 with 16 MB RAM. Most used DOS/Windows but the CS students dual booted to Linux (Slackware mostly, some SLS).
Similar, I had a Mac SE and was maybe the only person in my dorm section to have a new personal computer. But I also knew someone who had bought a Yugo, which was more expensive.
Anecdotally, I remember being excited for my dad to get a computer around 1994 or 1995, and it was a Mac IIci. A bunch of people I know got computers around then or within the next couple years, but before that it wasn't much of a thing. One of my earliest computer memories was using ClarisWorks Paint and spending (what seemed like) hours drawing a scarecrow while my parents watched, and then the computer crashed and it was all lost.
My mom had a word processor around then as well (can't remember which came first), a single purpose device for writing with a keyboard, a CRT monitor, and a printer. Looked somewhat like this[0] but I can't remember whether it was the same brand or not.
I remember painting abstract primate pictures with MacPaint when I was quite young. I was sad when we got the new computer because I think MacPaint didn’t make the transition to system 7 or something, and my dad told me we couldn’t open the files.
We also had a IIci. It came out I’m 89, and I was shocked to learn how insanely expensive it was at launch - $6000… $14k adjusted for inflation.
That was the era of really expensive computers, but each upgrade really seemed to do something phenomenally new - color or resolution or printer or 3D etc.
Nowadays it’s hard to really notice the upgrades without running benchmarks.
We (in Germany) didn’t have one until I was 12 in 1998, before that I’d visit my dad at work sometimes to play Prince of Persia on his office computer. I guess technically we had a Sinclair ZX81 in the cellar, but I wouldn’t find out about that till much later ;)
We (in Germany), by 1998, had 3 computers at home: a 400 mhz celeron connected to the internet, a hand me down 486 for my brother, and a hand me down 386 for me. All me friends were starting to get access to pentiums with tnts, by 2000 everybody was playing UT and counterstike.
Sometime in the mid-90s the local Microcenter had a deal on a $999 PC. IIR it was running Windows-95, but was otherwise a bare-minimum system. The "deal" was that the PC also had an ad infested border around the screen that ate up some non-trivial amount of the screen space.
The line to buy it would through nearly every aisle in the store, out the front door and down the block, for over a week. People were asking for forwards on their paychecks, taking out loans, selling cars, anything they could do to get a computer at this magic price point.
The main selling point? It had a modem and people could see what this "internet" business was all about for the first time.
We had a computer at home when I was a kid and in retrospect I was surprised to realize how unusual that was. I imagine it gave me far more advantage than I think.
my dad was taking a CS course starting in 1989 and they still had to send written programs by post mail to Warsaw because it would compile faster and "more accurately". from what he described the professors would do a "code review" but you only passed if it compiled there.
I know for a fact 30M commodore 64s were sold in the 80s in the USA. Not all commodores, not all home computers, just the classic model C64, 30M units sold. That's in a country that used to only have 250M people, so in theory 12% of Americans as of 1990 had purchased one specific model, the C64, leaving only 3% for all other models combined, which seems very unlikely.
Some of those probably went to schools not homes, although schools were owned by Apple II in those days...
My suspicion is many of those were unused in basements and closets, or the question was phrased weirdly like "have you purchased a computer in the last three years" or "used a home computer in the last month" or they defined "home computer" to be "not an IBM (office) or Apple (school) product" or something like that.