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Of course it was the case. What do you think things like Seti@Home were running on? People who owned computers had so many idle processor cycles that they were desperate to find something to do with them.

If 24/7 home computers were never a thing, what did BBSes run on?

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Same answer: Yes, but in this case your PC is doing something. It has a purpose. 24/7 without doing anything is a waste of energy.

This has somehow turned into your opinion on energy use (yes, it's good that desktop PCs can now decrease their energy use significantly while idle, which was not the case in the 90s).

But you made a claim that "this was never the case", when clearly there was an era of home desktop computing when your desktop could act as a hobbyist server. This era gave rise to BBSes, then MUDs, then Minecraft servers (and many things in between).

>when clearly there was an era of home desktop computing when your desktop could act as a hobbyist server

Yes, but again, you have used your PC for something. This has shifted to smaller (Raspberry Pis) or dedicated servers (or "cloud" stuff), so you could run this stuff there.

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