Still, there were cell phones in the 90s. Are the current smartphones that much more valuable than those early mobiles? Remember we are talking about 2 orders of magnitude here.
There were also PCs, and with Word Perfect and Lotus 123 you could do almost everything you do today with the latest office suite. At least almost everything of what the average user knows how to do.
The smartphones of the time were pretty clunky, didn't have good ecosystems, and required expensive/limited data plans.
Whereas OLPC was familiar and supposedly cheap and there were other cheap laptops coming in too.
Also, people raised on PCs with keyboards just couldn't imagine doing real work on a phone. I think many of us are still shocked at how a lot of kids are perfectly fine with and even prefer doing everything on their phone.
Yes, I'd bet that outside the office, the vast majority of "computer use" between say, 1998 and 2013 was for email and web browsing. That functionality moved to the smart phone, leaving mostly gamers and the computer literate as the remaining users.
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