This is a nice article going in the other chronological direction!
In North America, there was a period in the 80s and 90s where the Desktop PC was very much a shared device. You'd have it sitting somewhere like the living room or basement, maybe near the TV, you'd have a landline phone next to it, etc.
I think a lot of families had those, but it's very different from the idea of a "home office" where you have a separate/isolated work room.
My background is a mix of Fussellian mid- and upper-prole and regular ol’ middle, and an office space, if only a roll top desk tucked in a corner, but a room if space allowed, has always been a feature of my parents’ homes.
Pre-computer, that’s where paperwork and mail and other records that needed to be stored and worked with too long to live on the kitchen table (see: home space use studies, which spawned the misguided trend of building desks into kitchens in American houses) went. When desktop computers became a thing, that’s where the family computer went. (Yes, kids, even when we got the Internet at home, it was still located in a physical place you had to go and remain to keep using it—what a change smartphones have been!)
This version of the home office as a hub for personal document and important-paper-stuff management is basically dying, which is why it may seem surprising they ever existed. I don’t even need a laptop for most of this stuff, let alone an office—nearly everything important happens on my phone, and that’s becoming more normal. I don’t even need a kitchen table for it.
But my dining room/kitchen is lighter and airier. If I’m not shuffling a lot of paper, using dual monitors, or doing the rare video call, I mostly use a laptop downstairs.
I do prefer to use a laptop over a phone for most things though.