Part of this is modern house construction too (at least where I live in Europe); the living room / kitchen is just one big room, and upstairs there's two bedrooms (one of which can be split up).
I simply don't have the space to dedicate a room for one specific function. I'd love to be able to e.g. have a guest/living room with no tech, an office room for working, etc on top of separate bedrooms for everyone, but that's only possible now in older houses starting at €600,000 in the more remote parts of the country.
The whole point of the article is that families found spaces in their house to fit in a computer and it became the computer room even if it served other purposes.
> At my grandparents’ house, it was their office in the corner of the house. Their desktop PC was far from the kitchen, bedrooms, and living room, sandwiched between the coat rack and the washing machine.
In my house, the computer room was just our spare bedroom which ended up being the bedroom that my cousin lived in when we moved in with us to finish high school. I remember bugging my mom while she was playing solitaire, free cell, or minesweeper to see if I could use the computer to play Civilization 3 or Roller Coaster Tycoon.
At my friend's house it was a little inset desk on the middle floor of their split level that doubled as their dad's office. At my aunt's house it was a deck in the back of their living room next to their CD collection.
It was never a room completely devoted to the computer, but to the person who used the computer the most it became the computer room.