How many more people can buy computers now then when they were first made?

Answer 1

The early computers could not be bought by people; only the government, national weapons laboratories, large companies, and a few universities (typically with government grant funding) could afford one (and it usually was only one that they could afford).

It was not until the late 1960s when the price of minicomputers dropped to a couple of tens of thousands of dollars that an individual person could afford one, but if you did then you could not buy a house! However the minicomputer companies did not market to individuals and were not set up to handle such sales.

In 1975 the MITS Altair 8800 kit microcomputer became available and several thousand people could finally afford to buy their own computer, if they were experts with a soldering iron and were good at building kits with marginal to fair assembly instructions (I helped assemble one of these and those instructions though usable were sometimes quite frustrating, they definitely were not HeathKit quality assembly instructions).

Today practically everyone in the U.S. from kids to seniors have at least one if not several computers.

Some other things to consider:

Every cell phone contains two embedded computers: one for call management and one for audio signal processing. Also smartphones make the computers in the phone visible and programmable like any other computer.

Every modern car and truck contains multiple embedded computers to control various systems from emission controls to the antilock brakes to the environmental controls and so on.

So even people that did not explicitly buy a "computer" usually have several computers that they bought and use everyday without even thinking of them as being computers.

So from 1946 when the ENIAC was announced through most of the 1960s and no one could buy a computer, through 1975 when a few thousand hobbyists bought and built Altair 8800 microcomputers, to today when hundreds of millions of people (including many kids) in the U.S. alone buy several computers (both regular and embedded in other devices) and the figures will continue to explode into the future.