It's just weird how early adopters were so far ahead of the mainstream in the 1980s (UNIX workstations! 56k/T1/T3 WAN or 10Mbps LAN, or even FDDI!). In the 1990s, I was a teenager and had (by being smart, not particularly rich) a decent UNIX workstation (Linux) and 9600bps dialup from pretty early on, and by being at a top university and doing consulting, a laptop which would be borderline respectable today (if super heavy).

Today, a homeless guy can have a functional machine of his own, or use something at a library, and children/mainstream/etc. users can use approximately the same machines tech experts do.

It's basically range compression between what high-end people have and what the mainstream has.