This is a really interesting question because I think the definition of a home office has changed quite a bit.
In North America, there was a period in the 80s and 90s where the Desktop PC was very much a shared device. You'd have it sitting somewhere like the living room or basement, maybe near the TV, you'd have a landline phone next to it, etc.
I think a lot of families had those, but it's very different from the idea of a "home office" where you have a separate/isolated work room.
Anecdotally, my grandfather had a more extensive home office than I do. He never took work home with him from the company office, which he exclusively worked from. This would’ve been the 80’s when he was employed as an engineer manager in aerospace
The Official Preppy Handbook (tongue in cheek, of course, but its observations are often basically accurate) describe a dedicated office as a fixture of (what Fussell would classify as) upper-middle-class homes. Nb that class has historically had more flexibility on working from home than the rest of us, and generally been accustomed to looser restrictions and more freedom to set their own agendas (this has shifted with the intrusion of MBA- and finance-types into the strongholds of this class, like universities and hospitals, but that’s another topic) That account was published in 1980.
My background is a mix of Fussellian mid- and upper-prole and regular ol’ middle, and an office space, if only a roll top desk tucked in a corner, but a room if space allowed, has always been a feature of my parents’ homes.
Pre-computer, that’s where paperwork and mail and other records that needed to be stored and worked with too long to live on the kitchen table (see: home space use studies, which spawned the misguided trend of building desks into kitchens in American houses) went. When desktop computers became a thing, that’s where the family computer went. (Yes, kids, even when we got the Internet at home, it was still located in a physical place you had to go and remain to keep using it—what a change smartphones have been!)
This version of the home office as a hub for personal document and important-paper-stuff management is basically dying, which is why it may seem surprising they ever existed. I don’t even need a laptop for most of this stuff, let alone an office—nearly everything important happens on my phone, and that’s becoming more normal. I don’t even need a kitchen table for it.
