My family was on the border of upper-lower and lower-middle and we bought a computer once and used it for 10+ years. I dumpster dove later to scavenge parts for upgrading until the mid 2000s when cheap computers became available.
That's not true of many "objectively" poor people in the world, who even if they could buy the computer, they might not have had access to electricity to run it.
What, like a yearly vacation? Maybe they stayed home for Christmas one year instead of flying to visit family
Our childhood vacations were single-day (so we didn't have to pay for a hotel) road trips to a nearby state to go to an amusement park, or multi-day trips (also within driving distance) where my dad had to go somewhere for work and the hotel was paid for by his employer. It was a huge huge deal for us when, in the late 90s, we drove down to Disney World (a 13-hour drive) for a several-day trip.
And we never traveled around Christmas; that was one of the most expensive times of the year to travel!
Not sure when or where you grew up, but most middle-class folks in the US in the 80s didn't have a lot of discretionary income, and flights were (inflation adjusted) quite a bit more expensive than they are today.
I'm not saying that middle class families flew all the time in the 80s, but they absolutely could afford to if they wanted to make it a priority
A cursory google search seems to bear this out. Cheap flights in north america started in 1978 with some air travel deregulation.
We did have a computer but it was really a one time expense. At the time computers were improving quickly so I scavenged parts which wealthy areas that threw last Gen hardware away but were better than what we had (and I was a kid with a lot of time on my hands.) Giving a computer to a kid for Christmas in '83 is a very different value proposition than even a family vacation because a vacation is something the whole family does.
My family was working class not even lower middle class.
And even we flew a few times in the late 80s early 90s, and we had a (probably used) Tandy computer that hooked up to the living room TV.
People have different priorities. We certainly couldn’t have afforded a current generation top of the line computer, and we couldn’t have flown every year. But an older computer and the occasional flight were firmly attainable to anyone with stable job if they really wanted them.
Yes, obviously a Tandy or C64 in 1990 is different, but anyway this thread is beating a dead horse. I regret even starting it. It's the kind of off-topic nonsense that HN is filled with these days.
That depends very much on the computer.
https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1990-Sea...
Commodore 64C,1990, $159.99
My parents were working class in the 80s and we got a used Tandy that plugged into the TV and ran BASIC.
Even in the 90s, we kept relying on cast-offs from my dad's employer, and when I was preparing to go to college in '99, my parents scrounged to buy me the parts for a computer to build and take to college. But even then, my dad bought the parts at a discount through a former co-worker's consulting company, and vetoed a couple of my more expensive component choices.
And now that I think about it, my first laptop in 2003 was my dad's old work laptop that had been decommissioned.
US median household wage was $24k in 1985 and a c64 $150
More likely your parents decided to spend the money on something else. Like a $400 19” tv
Nah. I think "good enough AI for 95% of people" will be able to run locally within 3-5 years on consumer-accessible devices. There will be concentration of the best compute in AI companies for training, but inference will always become cheaper over time. Decommissioned training chips will also become inference chips, adding even more compute capacity to inference.
This is like computing once again. In 1990 only the upper class could afford computers, as of 2000 only the upper class owned mobile phones, as of now more or less everyone and their kid has these things.