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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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to be fair, 4bpp wrote

Movies... my experience of that era was in Germany

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.)