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Lolwhut?
That might describe the early to mid 80s but in the early 90s nearly every one of the people in my upper elementary school class had a computer at home and gaming was usually one of the main uses. By the mid to late 90s every desk job was computerized and IBM and insurance companies were known mostly for being particularly stuffy.
The BLS has an interesting piece on household computer ownership in the 1990s broken down by education level and race. The overall rate went from 15% in 1990 to 35% in 1997, but households headed by a college graduate went from 23% to 56%. It didn't take long for it to become a majority though - that was around the year 2000.
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I don't think this was usual. My father got a computer in 1997 or so and it was a big deal as a professional to have a PC.
I could see having a PC or Mac being a big deal in 1987 but to get one in the family only in 1997 would have been either intentional ludditism (typically by old people), a rare Amiga holdout or a major outlier here (likely due to never recovering from getting laid off during the early 90s recession). The question in 1997 was whether you already had dialup internet or were only planning on getting it soonish. If someone had suggested then that "computers were just for 50 year old suits in IBM and insurance companies", they would have been laughed at by the normies.
1997 is around when we got our first computer. We were kinda poor. Plenty of other families I knew from school didn't have one either. They didn't truly become a normal household appliance until the early 00s.
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Just to add my own piece to this, my family never got a home computer till 2001 for my birthday. I remember cause 9/11 happened two weeks later. I think you're the one thats atypical. Although I did grow up in a poor rural area. Maybe you grew up in a big city and thats why you think everyone had a computer in the 90s?
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to be fair, 4bpp wrote
Is there any other explanation needed? DW.com reported in 2025 how Germany has difficulties get past the fax machine. And in 1990s Germany wasn't even that much an outlier. Here is OECD paper "Access to and Use of Information Technologies at Home" from 1997. According to Table 5.1, percentage of households equipped with personal computer was <30% in all countries presented in the table, except for Denmark (32%). France, Spain and Japan were barely above 10% in 1995. In the same year, Swedish average computer ownership was 27.6%, and only the very upper education cohort (2+ years of university or more) broke above 50%. For a Swede with any other educational background, it was more common not to have a computer at home than have one.
Sounds like that kids in your upper elementary school class had quite young and educated parental background? (Or perhaps you didn't notice the kids without computers? My parents were below-median income, when I grew old enough to realize that, I became very hesitant to invite classmates over to visit because I had much less cool stuff to show, there wasn't cool things to do, and the apartment was small.)
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When I searched "90s PC ad", this and this were the first two non-Apple hits (both dorky cyberspace digital nature CG), followed by this (office stuff). Are you sure it was not your experience that was atypical?
The TV ads were stuffy garbage but it's not like consumers cared about those. Those ads were aimed at companies (and particularly managers) due to a 486 still costing a small fortune in 1992 and showing typical "manager pie chart" on the screen. There's a reason Apple made this campaign to poke fun at the corporate PC ad aesthetic.
And yes, I'm very sure my experience was typical for the era. If anything, I personally was lagging behind my peers with us only getting a computer in 1990 (money was somewhat tight with my mom being a single mother with three kids). When I started high school in the mid 90s, I distinctly recall all the teachers going out of their way to say "For gods sake, please write your home essays on a computer instead of by hand" (which stuck in my mind because our bitchy upper elementary school Finnish teacher liked to claim "You'll need to write everything with cursive in high school" which turned out to be the exact opposite of the truth). Computing was ubiquituous but the TV ads and similar "official" media representation lagged behind the situation on the ground. In 1994 when I had finally saved enough money to buy a decent computer of my own (a 486sx with a whopping 4 MB of ram - far from what would have been high end at the time), a school acquaitance practically begged me to play dialup Doom multiplayer with him and he was the very opposite of any sort of computer nerd (I had to walk him through the modem setup on the phone).
The problem with basically all the -wave "genres" (except new wave which looked to the future instead of to a fake past) is that they get the timeline wildly incorrect and mix and match made up fake "memories", assumptions from a bunch of hand drawn magazine cover art and only bits and pieces of what was the historical reality of the purported eras.
These are only problems if you consider these neowave genres to be historical preservation museums, which they aren't (the original music still exists for that). They're mashup/remix genres; the problems you describe are actually features.
I would agree with that except the fans of said genres themselves make the claim that they're "retro" to those decades when that is very obviously not the case. One such claim is right here in this thread. More commonly this happens with synthwave where people always claim it's "back to the 80s" when the actual 80s were nothing like that either in vibe, compositions, arrangements or sounds (the only thing "80s" about synthwave is the drum sounds and the visuals which harken to a very specific subset of 80s cover art).
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