I think that was late enough that a lot of adults that were buying computers for home were buying them to run a particular application, not to get into the esot

I think that was late enough that a lot of adults that were buying computers for home were buying them to run a particular application, not to get into the esoteric inner-workings of the computer. The type of people that essay were talking about wanted a computer to run a word processor that made text editing easier. Instead of having to rewrite your documents to move paragraphs around, you could instantly move them with cut and paste! Also built-in spell checker was pretty big in the era. As for the comparison to new phones, from the people I see using them, they are all doing stuff no home computer, or really any 80's computer could do. Live video chatting, remote text communication on the go, taking pictures, listening to music, watching videos, doom scrolling generic "content". In most ways, users are currently in the computing and communications golden age, far more so than the 80's.