HanJammer wrote:

Same at my school!

When I graduated from my school, the computer classes there still had MSX2s...

an81 wrote:

I am also from a post-soviet country, but I can't relate to the prevailing sentiment in this thread, of how supposedly most people in these countries were running their 286s well into the late 90s. Even though I got my first pc only in 2000 (Celeron 533, some rage card, 64 or 128mb ram, cost us almost 1000usd), most of the people I've known, none of them rich, had up to date computers. Some of the PCs of theirs circa 1997-1999 that I remember using (playing games on) were Pentium 166, Pentium II 233, K6-2. I can barely remember a single pre-Pentium machine from that era.

Interesting. Grew up in a fairly well off suburb to Stockholm, mine and most of my friend's and acquaintance's parents were university graduates. Have to join that sentiment too. The norm during the late 90's was that you had a "family computer", ranging from a by then ancient 386, to a modern Pentium machine. The latter were uncommon. We had an old 25MHz 486SX, which I upgraded to 33 MHz at some point. At least gave a few more FPS in Doom, and made Descent playable 😁

In 1998, the government instated the "home PC reform", which basically let employees rent a computer from their employer tax free. After 3 years, you were allowed to buy the PC at market value. In the reality, it was much cheaper. Some employers let their employees keep the PC for free. With Swedish tax rates, you can imagine it became a huge thing; compared to before, a PC was almost free. After that, almost everyone were on up to date hardware. Also, the big "Internet boom" and serious gaming on the PC platform came along during the same time, can imagine that sparked some interest too.

I believe that it basically was a cost question here. Also, there was no coolness factor in owning the latest and greatest in computer hardware amongst the parental generation, people generally were less materialistic back then. Also, openly being interested in computers would cost you more than a few steps on the social ladder as a secondary school kid. How was it where you grew up/live? Got the impression that the old Soviet states quite aggressively encouraged adoption of new technology amongst the peoples back then.

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In Germany, where the family pc was situated also sort of depended on the socioeconomic status of the family. More academic background meant that mom or dad probably had a study/office where the computer would be. More proletarian, then the pc might even be found in the living room or the hallway (that's how it was at my gf's home in the early 2000s). My dad had an office, so that's were our first 386 went in ca. 1994/95. It was a hand-me-down from my uncle, who is an architect and usually had a pretty recent pc and laptop. The only games that were on the computer were the one's that came with Qbasic (Nibbles and Gorilla) but my uncle also, for some reason, had disk 1 of King's Quest III, so those were the first pc games that I remember seeing.