this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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Not many people owned a PC before the internet blew up
But in my neck of the woods plenty of people owned a PC before Windows networking AND ISPs were reliable lol
Like yes I had Internet at home, but sometimes it didn't work very well, sometimes it was really slow, etc.
For years, it was almost normal in a small town to have an ethernet cable routed from your neighbour's house to yours, share a connection. Guess what, it'll be slow as shit when they're using it too. Or if the router needs to be restarted for some reason and they're not home? Welp.
Why did we have that setup? Estonia over 20 years ago was still pretty poor. This whole ADSL thing was pretty new too, it cost quite a bit. I found an article from that period and turns out in 2003 there were three main providers. Starman at 149 EEK per month, Eesti Telefon at 345 and Uninet at 800. I have no idea about Uninet, but Starman was only available in a couple of cities and even in those cities I think it was mostly just apartment buildings. Minimum monthly salary BEFORE tax was 2160 EEK. First 1000 EEK per month was income tax free, on the other 1160 EEK you'd be taxed 26% so 301 EEK. The remaining 1859 EEK, and this is with only income tax deducted, nothing else, is equivalent to 119.16 euros. 345 EEK for internet is 22 euros and change. Imagine spending 18% of your income on an Internet connection!
Still, a computer was becoming necessary for schoolwork. Researching subjects online, printing out homework, etc. If you didn't have one at home, you'd need to use computer class at the end of the day, or go to the library. Having one at home got me into gaming and tinkering with software and the tinkering got me into programming at the age of ~13 and you can guess what I do for a living now.
US here. I got my first "home computer" a TRS-80 CoCo (16k RAM) sometime around 1981 before PCs were a thing. The internet existed but cost around $7 US per hour plus it was a long distance call to Compuserve the only ISP which would have cost around 50 cents a minute (on a 1200 baud dial up modem). I still have an advertisement somewhere. Also i have a thin book of websites. You had to type in the IP address because domain names didn't exist yet. I couldn't afford any of this so I visited BBS's though I did fumble around with the internet on public library computers. The Macintosh and PCs came out a few years later but few homes had one because they were expensive and you couldn't do much with them besides play games. Businesses of course had them because they were useful. It wasn't until the mid 90's did everyone buy one after the internet got popular.