I'm wondering this after seeing a Simpsons episode from 1996 where someone comments that Homer "doesn't even have a computer". Well, why would he evenneed one?
I've seen that episode, but it isn't in my fresh memory. I think it's actually a joke that they say so: PC is thought to be a bit hip thing, or musthave. Not that owning one would have been unusual, but it was definitely not a must (like it is now considered). It also serves the storytelling: because they say so, Homer must buy one.
On the gerneral issue...
We had (because of my long insistence) a Commodore 64 when I was kid. I used it to play and program in Basic, but when the PCs in home begun to take place they were so expensive that I didn't even consider asking my parents to buy one. I also thought they were a little frightening and dull looking with their black-green monitors and unfamiliar user interface. (Even the disk drive of C64 was odd to me, mainly because I didn't understand the motivations of all the commands and didn't like the phonetics of the word "menu").
C64 also became too small for me, so I dropped out of the computer things. I used some in school as teen (91-92) with Win 3.1 I think, but didn't even know how to shut them down, I just turned the power off.
In 96 I encountered PCs again as I went to the uni. For most part people there read their mail and such in Unix terminals, but there were Windows machines too. There was also Linux rooms, but they were frightening with their nerds and such.
The Windows machines were suitable for text editing and internet browsing. Word was as painful as it is today, or perhaps less, there might've been less automated features. The net however was slow with all the pictures and frustrating due to small screen sizes, ugly and difficult to read layout, fonts and colours and all the pop-up and moving stuff. Also, there were not much of interest there, at least suitable to be browsed in school.
I didn't like Windows much, so I used mostly Pine, Lynx and Tin in Unix for my net adventures. They were quick to access, a terminal was always available, no one saw over your shoulder what you were doing, and it required only minimum hand movements. Back then pages were more readable through text-browser than now. Although there were frustratingly many that weren't. (As late as 2002-3 I wrote my master's theses in Unix with Pico in other screen and command to build it in another).
Frames on websites were a big issue back then too. Very many made noise on their pages that they don't have frames. It was kidnd of like pop-ups now.
There wasn't Google in 96, and the net search engines were
lousy. There were different search engines, Altavista and AskJeeves to name two, and the net was kind of chaos then. People had links to them in their homepages, as well as ton of other links to pretty general stuff. There were plenty of cryptic www-addresses in papers too.
My neighbours (Students too) used actively the most developed feature of the net: the porn. One neighbour even had his homepage published in a porn magazine due to it having huge porn link collections. It was kind of creepy though, and kids in the comp sci department (it was actually part of maths then) made a game of him, called "Porn-****", where he had to catch different items falling from the sky matching to the theme of the game. When he caught one, he shouted aloud a vulgar name for it.
That game wasn't very popular, but my neighbours played
a lot Doom via net then. Our apartment building had net in every apartment, the first such student building in the town. It raised the cost of otherwise cheap place, which I had chosen due to low rents. Other game of the era I remember was Triplane Tumoil because two of my friend were thrown out of computer room in the uni for playing it pretty loudly. "Boys... If you have no other things to do except playing, go away", the janitor had said to them in a fatherly tone.
What I learned from living next door to gaming- and irc-nerds was that PC isn't necessary, and will probably make your life boring and miserable. I had no need for one because I could use them in school. I also learned some discipline of the old school comp sci-nerds: that you have to strive for simplicity, that you must be cautious of your password and lock the screen when you're not on the computer (not just for your own sake, but for general good too). And I also learned to respect (but not to use) Linux. I learned to be cautious of asking nerds anything, because the answer would be either RTFM or an incomprehensible two hour lecture (with the lesson make your own operating system and program all the applications there to be able to print a page).
I bought my first PC in 2004 in search for happiness by consuming money and buying stuff. I tried to learn C++, but it was boring due to the book I used. Then I tried SimCity and then FreeCiv. After that everything I was afraid of in owning PC became true. Although I learned to admit that I like gaming. I've learned to tone it down too and have long pauses not playing at all. In retrospect I was happier without PC, but feel too tied to it now to throw it away, and that there's no turning back once you've tried some of the games.
