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By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a household to be without a personal computer. Only fifteen percent of American households had a compu

By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a household to be without a personal computer. Only fifteen percent of American households had a computer in 1990.

reaperducer 4y ago
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)
- ddulaney 4y ago
  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!
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Heres something for you to consider. 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. Imagine that today!
    - pcrh 4y ago
      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
      - ghaff 4y ago
        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.
    - watersb 4y ago
      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.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    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.
- PopAlongKid 4y ago
  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.
  - maestroia 4y ago
    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.)
    - watersb 4y ago
      Our high-end Mac IIci setups were $8000 each. So easy to forget these mind-boggling prices, as they were usual and customary (for that level) at the time.
- 13of40 4y ago
  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.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    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.
    - 13of40 4y ago
      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.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    How were you in 1st grade in 1981 but high school in the early 90s?
Semaphor 4y ago
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 ;)
- ant6n 4y ago
  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.
VLM 4y ago
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.
- Transfinity 4y ago
  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.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Call-out: we're also talking about mostly un-networked computers here. 1989 is the very beginning of "the Internet might be useful for general purposes by non-scientists." And incidentally, the same year BGP was dreamed up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(internet_service_provider) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(internet_service_... So most computers were running boxed retail software with extremely limited hard drive data space (if present at all).
    - loloquwowndueo 4y ago
      Computers were networking years before the rise of the Internet. BBSes were a thing in the 80s.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
MiddleEndian 4y ago
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. 0. https://i.imgur.com/Wx6eKZE.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/Wx6eKZE.jpeg
- sircastor 4y ago
  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.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    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.
sircastor 4y ago
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.
bane 4y ago
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.
flomo 4y ago
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.)
- luma 4y ago
  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.
  - Cockbrand 4y ago
    TIL there was an XT 286. I always thought that the 286 was exclusive to the AT.
  - NateLawson 4y ago
    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).
    - UncleSlacky 4y ago
      I remember being jealous of those doing Cybernetics at Reading (UK) as one of the big manufacturers donated a PC to every student on the course.
  - flomo 4y ago
    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.
tacens 4y ago
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.

By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a household to be without a personal computer. Only fifteen percent of American households had a computer in 1990.

reaperducer 4y ago

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)

ddulaney 4y ago
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!
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Heres something for you to consider. 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. Imagine that today!
  - pcrh 4y ago
    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
    - ghaff 4y ago
      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.
  - watersb 4y ago
    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.
- ghaff 4y ago
  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.
PopAlongKid 4y ago
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.
- maestroia 4y ago
  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.)
  - watersb 4y ago
    Our high-end Mac IIci setups were $8000 each. So easy to forget these mind-boggling prices, as they were usual and customary (for that level) at the time.
13of40 4y ago
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.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  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.
  - 13of40 4y ago
    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.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  How were you in 1st grade in 1981 but high school in the early 90s?

Semaphor 4y ago

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 ;)

ant6n 4y ago
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.

VLM 4y ago

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.

Transfinity 4y ago
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.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Call-out: we're also talking about mostly un-networked computers here. 1989 is the very beginning of "the Internet might be useful for general purposes by non-scientists." And incidentally, the same year BGP was dreamed up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(internet_service_provider) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(internet_service_... So most computers were running boxed retail software with extremely limited hard drive data space (if present at all).
  - loloquwowndueo 4y ago
    Computers were networking years before the rise of the Internet. BBSes were a thing in the 80s.
    - ethbr0 4y ago

MiddleEndian 4y ago

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. 0. https://i.imgur.com/Wx6eKZE.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/Wx6eKZE.jpeg

sircastor 4y ago
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.
- bombcar 4y ago
  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.

sircastor 4y ago

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.

bane 4y ago

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.

flomo 4y ago

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.)

luma 4y ago
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.
- Cockbrand 4y ago
  TIL there was an XT 286. I always thought that the 286 was exclusive to the AT.
- NateLawson 4y ago
  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).
  - UncleSlacky 4y ago
    I remember being jealous of those doing Cybernetics at Reading (UK) as one of the big manufacturers donated a PC to every student on the course.
- flomo 4y ago
  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.

tacens 4y ago

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.