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Comment by scoot | Hacker News Reader

> When I was a youngster in the early 90s [...] most homes didn't have a computer

"Most homes" might be technically correct, but home computers were a thing since the late 70s, and really taking off in the early 1980s withe the ZX81, ZX Spectrum, VIC 20, Commodore 64, and a myriad of others, depending on your geography.

> Almost nobody my age was playing computer games, only people working in industry.

This, of course, is complete nonsense. By the early 90s capable home computers such as the Amiga and Atari had if anything reached their hayday, with a myriad of popular games available. (Not to mention the popularity of dedicated games consoles.)

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I think you should allow people to share their own anecdotes and recollection of their own childhood. Its not like this person claimed that this was the case for all of the world, all of the US or all of their state. Maybe few/nobody his age where he lived was playing computer games, how can you know if that is nonsense?

He's right though. Home PCs exploded in the early 90s. He said he was in DC. What he's saying is just not accurate at all. I grew up in a small Midwest town and tons of people had computers in the early 90s. Most people had a PC and internet by the late 90s. It was the heyday of Doom for crying out loud.

In the early 90s it depended vastly on your demographic in my neck of the woods (Minneapolis). I read that comment largely nodding in agreement.

First you had to be able to afford one, even second hand 286's in the early 90's were a moderate expense for many families.

I was absolutely the abnormal one of my peer group in school when I had pre-existing computer knowledge from home for "computer class". Certainly the only one at all into gaming on it, other than friends enjoying coming over to play random games at times.

Entering high school in the mid-90's there were only maybe a half dozen to dozen kids who you could remotely describe as "PC Gamers" - but plenty of console folks who you could at least talk with. Only a small handful who regularly used BBS' or knew what a MUD was or the like.

I think for "most houses had a PC by then" might be accurate for houses with school-age children (as it was a powerful meme by then you needed one for schoolwork), but I don't recall a single childless relative having one other than the hacker uncle who taught me. The vast majority of my peers who had PCs or Macs at home never really used them other than as-prescribed for word processing or whatnot - a lot lacked the hardware (math coprocessors, sound card, a bit later graphics accelerators) to really interest most kids when they had been exposed to arcades and the NES by then.

It rapidly shifted around 93-95 or so, but the years fly by so I could be off a couple. I remember distinctly going from being the only one who had ever heard of the Internet to being asked daily about how to get hooked up. Crazy rates of change compared to today's relatively stagnant industry.

My experiences are similar, though I lived in Packer country. I was very middle/lower middle class, and by 96, I would say most homes had PCs and started seeing some AOL installs, and by 2000 or so, most also had internet.

Late 80s however, the most advanced computers I'd see were parents that used them for work (developers and accountants) and Atari/Commodore 64.

Prices started dropping rapidly around 1990, and specs went explosively through the roof.

A great time to be alive, for sure.

> and by 96, I would say most homes had PCs

Only ~35% of US households had a computer in 1997 [0]. Goes to show that your particular surroundings can easily skew your view of the situation.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/Apr/wk1/art01.htm

Right, throw out seniors and households below the poverty line and I bet that number shoots to like 85%. The avg/median person very likely had a PC in 97.

There's quite a bit wrong with that statement.

If you just discard the data you don't like you will indeed end up only with the numbers you like. To turn the 35% into 85% you eliminated 60% of the households from the statistic.

The average or median person (household?) may have had one but it was still just 35%. So if you lived in a place with few old or poor people and the feeling that "everyone had a computer" was justified, it would just show how biased such anecdotes are. Because it means somewhere else a twice as many people lived surrounded only by the rest of the households where there were almost no computers at all. And in the "early 90s" the ratio was closer to 1:5.

> Goes to show that your particular surroundings can easily skew your view of the situation.

It’s hard to truly capture how revolutionary Doom was when it dropped in ‘93. One could argue categorizing PC gaming history as “before/after Doom” the same way people say pre/post [major historic event usually a war].

Maybe not people his age, but I suspect he was simply too young to be aware of the burgeoning home computer scene, as made apparent but the bizarre suggestion that the only people playing computer games were computer professionals. As I said, "nonsense".

Even as late as 1997 only ~35% of households in the US had a computer [0]. Earlier in the '90s it would have been quite a bit fewer, closer to the ~15% in 1990. Elsewhere in the world even fewer still. And it's very plausible that computer professionals were more likely to have a computer, substantially above the average.

You seem to have taken offense with what OP said and returned it for free, with no arguments attached.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/Apr/wk1/art01.htm

This strikes me as a bit pedantic as both of you are somewhat right and ultimately a lot of the assessments have been pretty subjective/qualitative. I tend to lean towards the other guy’s characterization personally, but I wouldn’t say you’re wrong. Part of it is that we have to recognize the video game industry dwarfs all other media right now - but in the early 90’s? Not even close. Yes gaming existed prior, including computer games, but the vast majority of kids did not have the technical know-how, let alone the hardware, to install and run them until later in the decade. Adults at the time were a very mixed bag about it, with most electing to not participate at all.

Doom came out in 1993. Things really began to shift about that time. By ‘96/‘97 you had Starcraft and other games start blowing up, but that’s latter half of the decade for sure.

My perspective (from near Dayton, Ohio, US, born in 1977) was that a significant number of people had home computers (a lot of Commodore 64's and VIC 20's, various TRS-80 models, some Atari 8-bit machines, some TI machines, a few Amiga machines, a scant few Apple II's and even fewer Macintosh machines) but most kids my age weren't using the machines significantly.

Kids might play a game here or there, or type a school paper on them, but that was mostly it. I went to a few of the local "computer club" meetings that were mostly attended by the stereotypical middle-aged "computer guy" (who I have now become... >sigh<). Doom was definitely "a thing" in the early 90s and started to bring some of the kids over into PC gaming. We had a small BBS scene, too, so that brought a few of the more computer-inclined kids into computing. (Of course, the ISPs moving in in 94-95 killed the BBS scene quickly.)

Game consoles-- the Atari 2600, NES, and SNES-- were the only significant interaction with computing devices at home that I saw. The "gaming scene", in the early 90s, was mostly about NES / SNES carts and arcade games (Mortal Kombat was a big deal).

I didn't got to a particularly well-funded public school so I saw Atari 8-bit, Apple II, and Mac LC machines there. Oh, and TI calculators, of course (but, sadly, mostly the TI-81... The '85 wasn't becoming "a thing" until I was in college).

Yeah this is very much how I’d describe as well. Nintendo had captured ~90% of the console market in the late 80’s/early 90’s while consoles were basically THE way most people played video games.

There’s a great book called Console Wars if anyone is curious about the rise of Nintendo, Sega, etc. It can be a tad dry at times but overall the stories behind these companies are often compelling in their own right. It does a GREAT job of explaining early gaming at universities and how certain programs proliferated. The 70’s were fascinating - people saw what games could be but were all tripping over each other trying to figure out how to get there.

I'm a few years older than you. In my suburban schools in the S.F. Bay Area, many kids were producing any writing homework printed on home computers or word processors as soon as the teachers relented on requiring "cursive" handwriting. I think this began around the 4th or 5th grade and ramped up through middle school (so around 1983-1988 in my case).

Early on, the homework signaled which families had Apples and Macs with fancy printers that made an attempt at WYSIWG rendered fonts instead of grotty fixed font dot matrix. A lot of kids had Macs without techie parents but I suppose white-collar jobs or even some tradesmen who had made it to middle or upper-middle class. By high school PCs with Windows and laser printers were joining the fray. Marketing told parents this was good for their kids, and kids were aware of the wealth indicator too.

I feel like home computers were more office tools or educational rather than game platforms for most of my peers. I remember a subset of kids had games on VIC 20, C64, DOS PC, or Apple IIe/IIc in the mid 80s. By the late 80s we had more PC games, but many households already had dedicated Atari, Nintendo, or Sega set-top gaming. I think shareware and pirated game floppies did circulate further than just those who actually attended or even knew what a computer club or BBS might be.

I lean towards the other poster too. In 1994, my household had a computer with windows 3.1 and games. My dad was a software engineer. I was still in grade school. Every other kid who had a desktop computer and Doom 2 at home had a parent who worked as a software developer/engineer, or they were some sort of IT/network/sys/admin. The only exception I can recall is a kid whose parents were neither, but his uncle was one of the OG Blizzard devs.

Things changed very fast after 1994, though. I think by 1998, everyone I knew had a desktop at home, even if they didn't play videogames.

>Almost nobody my age was playing computer games, only people working in industry.

I recall these days and this statement has some truth to it. Sure, a lot of folks had home computers, but they were mostly people who were interested in computers in the first place, and that was because of their work in the industry.

Went to high school in an affluent suburb in the 90s in the US. “Playing computer games with friends” was either on one computer or involved dragging a computer over to a friend’s house and wiring it together with their desktop. Parent’s experience rings true to me.

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