I found some examples on the interwebs.
For those of you young enough to not recognize a bunch of this stuff: TV is mounted to the wall. I’m not sure what’s under it (picture isn’t clear enough on my phone), but to the immediate right is the printer, the computer tower—the bit you turned on that did all the actual computing—is beneath it, and the computer monitor—the bit with the screen so you could see things—is to the right. There’s a small CD/cassette/speakers setup above it.
This would have been in someone’s living room. Super Nintendo/SNES to the left with a VCR/VHS player below it, computer speakers and monitor to the right, tower below. What’s inside that closed door is probably CD-ROMs and the paper files you’d need to work on the computer (since a lot of this stuff wasn’t fully digitized yet).
This isn’t a home computer room, I just want you all to know what we had and lost. These are iMacs. My college computer labs looked exactly like this except every room was a solid color (one lab had all blue, one lab had all pink, one lab had all orange). I also need you to know that as far as I’m aware, iMacs ran Windows by default. All of the computer labs at my college ran on Windows. Imagine a future in beautiful color where you can see what’s in your machine.
Look under the desk all the way on the right. That’s two towers and what I think is an external drive. Yeah, you know those things so tiny your own thumb is bigger and they hold a whole computer’s worth of data? That’s what they used to look like. They didn’t hold a whole computer’s worth back then, either. This looks like another corner-of-the-living-room setup.
You can see the modem in this one, I think. It’s on the bottom left. My family briefly owned this desk. We had to bin it because it couldn’t hold a printer or my mom’s college work, much less both.
I can’t tell if that thing on top of the TV is a TiVo (early form of streaming) or a cable digital converter box, but I have seen this room in the houses of my childhood. I think I actually knew someone with those curtains. I need to emphasize this…is the room. This is the focal point. The other half of the room might have a table or some bookshelves or something, but you are looking at the entire point of the room. And you’ll notice these folks didn’t even have a printer!
This is what we mean by “computer room.” Our computers and the software we needed to run them, plus supplemental materials like notebooks, were so big we needed AN ENTIRE ROOM.