When did computers become common thing?

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Many people points out that video games have fallen once gaming became a casual thing. Before it happened, there had to be some 'infrastructure' created and that the main question - when did computers became widely available stuff in your country?

In Poland things were distorted because of communism and electronics was expensive for so long.

C64 were best selling computer of all time in the world but here, it's Atari that dominated the market - so is it C64 worldwide?

Or just IBM PC with Windows 3.11? Windows 95?

I have many friends that didn't buy IBM until the very late '90 and they keep their Amigas, hell one o them even keep Atari XE or XL until he bought Pentium II around 2000 so I'd say that in Poland PC went full casual with the release of XP.

 

[Daemongar]

As someone who ran the gamut of computers - first 486 in 1993 - I will tell you for America. I also had an Amiga and also owned an Atari 400.

I'd say computer ownership approached the norm around 1997. Around the time of AOL and Geocities. People were running Windows 95 but were starting to get in the swing with Netscape or IE (Mosaic was dead.) Games were getting better, Windows 95 was helping folks run their systems better, and the adoption of WYSIWYG type Word Processors was required for day-to-day functioning.

 

[Falksi]

Yep, I'm with Daemongar in that the mid-late 90's saw a culture shift where it became common place. Windows 95/98 bought PC's to the masses, and the Playstation 1 took consoles from the Nerd realm to the Chad realm.

PC World pushed expansion by buying DN Computer Services in November 1996, followed by Byte Computer Superstores Ltd in April 1997, and around that time Packard Bellpopularized the "family PC" bundle which helped changed the perception of the PC from being a business machine, to one all the family could use.

Which was of course complete bollocks, as most Packard Bell bundles came so stacked out with so much gimmicky software, that a few weeks letting the family loose fucking about on it with it would see months of phonecalls & tech support ensue as they tried to salvage some smattering of the false promises the PC World Salesmen gave then.

 

[Bloodeyes]

Computers were around when I was growing up, but none of my friends actually had one. My school had a computer but we were hardly ever allowed to use it (this was the 90s). I grew up middle class and got my first comp in 2001 I think. Only one of my friends had one, another middle class guy. All my other friends were working class and didn't have computers. Some still don't and just access social media sites on their smartphones. To them, games are console/mobile games and the Internet is Facebook/instagram/snapchat. Most people are at least kind of computer literate now but it still isn't the case that everyone has a PC. I know as many people that don't actually have their own computer as people that do. Everyone has a cellphone, not a computer. Unless you consider a smartphone a computer, which it is.

 

[gurugeorge]

Many people points out that video games have fallen once gaming became a casual thing. Before it happened, there had to be some 'infrastructure' created and that the main question - when did computers became widely available stuff in your country?

In Poland things were distorted because of communism and electronics was expensive for so long.

C64 were best selling computer of all time in the world but here, it's Atari that dominated the market - so is it C64 worldwide?

Or just IBM PC with Windows 3.11? Windows 95?

I have many friends that didn't buy IBM until the very late '90 and they keep their Amigas, hell one o them even keep Atari XE or XL until he bought Pentium II around 2000 so I'd say that in Poland PC went full casual with the release of XP.

About the mid-90s in the UK. In the early 90s shops that made and sold IBM compatibles started mushrooming all over the place. That's when they crept into average homes. The internet (up to that point restricted mostly to "internet cafes") came along with that.

 

[DraQ]

Many people points out that video games have fallen once gaming became a casual thing. Before it happened, there had to be some 'infrastructure' created and that the main question - when did computers became widely available stuff in your country?

In Poland things were distorted because of communism and electronics was expensive for so long.

C64 were best selling computer of all time in the world but here, it's Atari that dominated the market - so is it C64 worldwide?

Pokochałem me atari
było z drewna i ze stali...

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

As a kid growing up in the 80s, hardly anyone I knew had computers. I had two friends that had computers. One was a kid in my 3rd grade class that tried to bully me until I beat him up, his dad owned a nice Texas Instruments PC; and one of my other friends, his dad worked as an engineer at Mcdonell-Douglas. They had an IBM with some cool paint/edit programs that blew me away. Tried my first copy-paste on it. 1987/88 era. That was all pretty rare then.

I'd say it was Doom that brought in the PC era. Everyone bought the marketing and had to have a PC to play Doom. If the boys at Id really had an idea about what they had, they would have held out for more zeroes.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Computers were around when I was growing up, but none of my friends actually had one. My school had a computer but we were hardly ever allowed to use it (this was the 90s). I grew up middle class and got my first comp in 2001 I think. Only one of my friends had one, another middle class guy. All my other friends were working class and didn't have computers. Some still don't and just access social media sites on their smartphones. To them, games are console/mobile games and the Internet is Facebook/instagram/snapchat. Most people are at least kind of computer literate now but it still isn't the case that everyone has a PC. I know as many people that don't actually have their own computer as people that do. Everyone has a cellphone, not a computer. Unless you consider a smartphone a computer, which it is.

Are you from Russia?

Pokochałem me atari
było z drewna i ze stali...

Z prądem niezbyt to działało, węgla sypać należało
węgiel sypać trzeba równo bo się często psuje gówno

 

[FritzedProcess]

I'd say around 1997 as others have pointed out. There was a tipping point that year with the Internet becoming available enough (and the first flat-rate connections becoming available that year or the year before, although not cheaply) and budget-level "multimedia" (buzzword of that decade) PC clones from OEMs (mostly Packard Bell, Dell, and Compaq) being offered to end users instead of just bulk buyers (i.e.: company offices).

Growing up in the 80s, in my school we had IT labs in which we took classes in several subjects (not the nirm in the Spanish educational system; we used MS-DOS and GWBASIC for the most part, with some WordStar or WordPerfect thrown in), on IBM 8086s running MS DOS 3.0 IIRC. Those computers had been bought in the early 80s to replace Spectrums and C64s, when it was apparent that IBM compatibles were going to be the standard of the future. I had an MSX (one of the 16 kB models), and I was the only one to own a computer (some kids' father had an IBM PC at home, but for work only, so it might as well be the 2001 monolith to those kids), and I was rightly labelled a nerd. By 1990 or 91, one of my friends had a 286 with 1 MB of RAM, but noone else, and by '93 I had a 386DX with 4 MB of RAM and an HP Deskjet 550C (a fine machine, it was thrown away in 2009 because my father got himself a POS multifunction inkjet... if he'd told me I would have taken it home and bought a dedicated scanner instead of my POS cheap multifunction) and some of my classmates had "inherited" their parents' work machines.

By 1996 it was the norm to hand in papers and essays printed on an inkjet, but typewritten stuff was the norm just a year before, and by 1997 everyone and his dog had a PC, and some of my classmates had Internet at home, but this was a private school and not the norm in Spain.

 

[gurugeorge]

Everyone bought the marketing and had to have a PC to play Doom.

This is partly true, but we also bought PCs because people would play the Doom shareware on office computers and word got around.

Myself, when I was working in a recording studio, the guy in the editing suite was playing Doom on the PC used for editing, and I swear to God my palms started sweating and realized I just HAD to get a PC to play this amazing thing.

I'd had absolutely no interest in videogaming up to that point, zero; but as soon as I felt the feeling of moving through a 3-d space like that, I was hooked.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Computer penetration in United States households reached one-tenth in 1986, one-quarter in 1994, one-half in 2000, and three-quarters in 2010, following the usual logistics curve for technological diffusion.