>A couple of decades ago PCs were still too expensive for regular people to buy, they were mostly owned by businesses and the upper middle class. This sounded

>A couple of decades ago PCs were still too expensive for regular people to buy, they were mostly owned by businesses and the upper middle class. This sounded wrong to me, but in the interests of not just making a kneejerk response, I googled and found total global sales from 1997-2000 estimated at ~400 million PCs[1] and also a claim[2] that at that time about 60 percent of US households had at least one personal computer. Also, since the 80s, affordable computers were available, and sold in the millions,[3] so I don't think it's valid to say the reason they were mostly owned by businesses and the upper middle class at that point was because they were too expensive. It was more that people in the upper middle class used computers at work and could relate to why they were the future, and that future included them/their children, so they were likely to see value in a new computer rather than something else. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_computer_vendors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu... [2]https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/DianeEnnefils.shtml https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/DianeEnnefils.shtml [3]By 1985, the Commodore 64 was selling for <$150, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64