I remember those days when availability of cheap PCs enabled average people to write SW to run their businesses. I'm not very nostalgic about those days though. What else I remember: expensive SW on stacks of floppies, lots of incompatible network HW and protocols, crashy early versions of Windows and MacOS. I did love OS/2 when it came out, though, maybe I was the only one...
I think this is the golden age right now, you can still experience coding on small systems like microcontrollers or you can go up to any kind of OS and HW at practically no cost.
PCs sure didn't seem particularly cheap "back then"; at least, not for my "back then". $2300 in 1993 money for a 486/dx33 is over $4100 in today's money. I just bought a brand new, loaded MacBook Air for $1600.
IMHO early cheap PCs were machines like the Commodore 64, Apple IIe, and the like.
You could do business on those machines, with some limitations. We had a word processor on the Commodore 64 that through some black magic even managed to have a spellchecker. The big downside was that our 9 pin dot matrix printer couldn't print descenders so characters like g j and y were pushed up a couple of points.
I'm sure there are people on this board who can tell you about industrial equipment controlled via a dongle hanging off of the cartridge port on a C=64.
One of our early automated tools on the inkjet cartridge assembly line was controlled by a hp calculator that had an expansion slot. I think the app that opened and closed valves and actuators was written in BASIC. The workmanship of those things was at least as good as some modern PLCs.
These were home computers, not PC's. Basically glorified desk calculators, though the multimedia capabilities were impressive for the time and some office work could be done on them. The industrial control jobs you mention would be well within Arduino territory today.
And even those were not "cheap" at all in modern terms; the cheapest would cost around $500 or so in today's money.
I think this is the golden age right now, you can still experience coding on small systems like microcontrollers or you can go up to any kind of OS and HW at practically no cost.