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.
Only fifteen percent of American households had a computer in 1990.
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.
Trammel claimed 30m based on a remembered estimate of rough sales numbers per year, but the only estimate that’s based on objective evidence - serial number analysis - is 12.5m.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160306232450/http://www.pageta...
Here's an interesting discussion link. Merely being on wikipedia doesn't mean its correct that site is a hive of disinfo in general:
https://www.pagetable.com/?p=547
This site even mentions the peculiar 30M figure.
I would tend to believe the linked site's serial number analysis result of exactly 12.5M. The americans did something like that to the germans in WWII, it turns out a remarkably small totally random sample of sequentially assigned serial numbers is enough to very accurately predict the highest number sold. Assuming very random sampling, which is never truly random, of course.
Doesn't change the overall outcome, however, when there's a stat that a small segment of an industry is "about" the size of what's claimed to be the entire industry, something's off in the numbers.
A mere 12.5M sold remains 5% of the entire USA population at that time, and honestly, having been there, almost everyone I knew had a PC clone or some apple product, usually a mac. The number must be larger than 10%. "a computer" was required at college ... ed.gov claims there are 19.4 M college students in the USA right now and google claims 332M people in the USA right now, so about 6% of the population are in college right now, so back in 1990 guess "around" 6% of the population was required to own a computer just to attend higher ed ... the claimed 10% seems like an incredibly low number.
In 1990? No way. I was taking college courses (for HS credit) in 1990, and the first I heard of a requirement to bring your own computer was years after that.
Another thing that skews the numbers is that my household during the 80s had two Color Computers, a C64, and an Amiga 500, but no one else in my social circle had anything more general than a Nintendo or Atari console.
Computer Science courses generally just required a remote dumb terminal, such as a VT100 or ADM 3a. These were available in a few rooms around campus as well.
One person on my course caused a minor stir by bringing a "laptop" to a lecture to take notes in about 1991 - the keyboard was so noisy that they only did it once!
All engineering students had a computer, though.
Funny how many of the ads say "Call us for more information about our offerings!" instead of a "For more info: www....".
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_...
So most computers were running boxed retail software with extremely limited hard drive data space (if present at all).
Computer control of modems using standardized Hayes(+) command sets over RS-232 serial ports (1981), the Bell breakup (1984) and subsequent competition, and increased modem manufacturer competition breaking price-per-baud standards and increasing affordability (~1988) were required enablers to take it mass market.
It took until the early 90s that you could (a) buy a PC at a reasonable price, (b) buy a modem at a reasonable price (that was guaranteed to work with your PC), (c) dial into an ISP's local number... from anywhere in the US.
Yes, some people lived in NYC, Chicago, SF, etc. and had access to knowledge and BBS infrastructure at local rates earlier than that, but most people didn't.
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)
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.
So easy to forget these mind-boggling prices, as they were usual and customary (for that level) at the time.
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!
She grew up in roughly the same area where we lived when I was a kid, and so she actually want to a previous iteration of a girl's school I've visited in the 1990s, but back then as well as sex segregated selective education (ie my school was specifically for boys who "tested well" at age 12, hers was for girls who likewise tested well at age 12) the assumptions about future life roles were... very static. She wasn't doing well enough to be sent to University, so the assumption was she'd get a secretarial type job, and probably marry in her 20s, get pregnant and drop out of the work force.
So, they taught her to type. This is the 1960s, so she's not learning Word, she's learning how to use a manual typewriter, because it's expected she'll be in a typing pool, maybe a clerk, or at most a PA. She actually had very different ideas of what she'd do, and after finishing her course turned down a Computer Operator job because it wouldn't lead to what she was interested in - but in the end as predicted she ended up married, pregnant (with me) and giving up work in 1975.
Anyway, fast forward twenty years, my sister and I have "flown the nest" so to speak and money is tight, my father has been made redundant and will never have another white collar job for the rest of his life - so she gets an administrative job. Understandably they want somebody who can type, and she checks the box even though she's been out of the workforce for twenty years. Hasn't much idea how to use Word or indeed Windows, but she's fairly smart and can muddle along. It's interesting how unexpectedly that skill, which she didn't really value at the time, was crucial to her again.
Eventually the IT stuff was too much for her, and she took early retirement because both the extra IT training and the constant pressure to "do more with less" (the government likes the idea of a powerful military, but doesn't like spending money on it, she was an administrator for the Ministry of Defence) made it intolerable. But if she'd never learned typing as a teenager I think she'd have really struggled to find work with a "Homemaker gap" in her CV matching the IT revolution.
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.
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.
(edit this was for a 'real' PC compatible or Mac, you could probably find C64s and etc at the flea market.)
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.
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.
Nowadays it’s hard to really notice the upgrades without running benchmarks.
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.