Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

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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)

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.

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.)

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.

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!

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!

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

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.

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.

One of the fun things about my mother was that as a teenager she'd been taught to type.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How were you in 1st grade in 1981 but high school in the early 90s?

I neither skipped nor repeated any years.

1981 + 9 = 1990

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