I don't know if you remember 1986 (I know I don't), but from what I understand from the history books, computers communicated at around 300 baud and even if you exclude the mandatory freon compressor, the amount of energy required to run a computer with processor power equivalent to the phone in your pocket would still have been measured in tons of coal per fortnight.
I do remember 1986--I was in college then--and it wasn't that bad. (Though your description was very entertaining.) PCs with modems existed in the late 1970's--a friend's father had a Commodore PET at that time. Certainly by the mid-1980s, with the IBM PC and clones going strong and Apple having released several different lines including the original Macs, computers were no longer just "huge corporate things".
But those were simply hobbyist things like the Arduino or Raspberry Pi are today. I find it very hard to believe that anyone in congress reponsible for drafting the CFAA were considering anything other than corporate use of computers, just like it would be hard to imagine congress taking interest in the Arduino or Raspberry Pi today and passing legislation that impacts those and other hobbyist devices and platforms.
Huh? The IBM-PC and clones, and the Apple II, Lisa, and Mac, were certainly not "hobbyist" computers. They were used by businesses to do spreadsheets and accounting, by artists to do graphics, and by all kinds of people to do the same sorts of basic tasks we use computers for today. (I did so myself; I had a PC clone, and my college roommate had an Apple II, and they certainly weren't "hobbyist" computers; we used them for serious work.) Even if Congress was only considering "corporate use" of computers in 1986, which is arguable, PCs and Macs were already part of "corporate use".
If you want to say that Congress was too technically ignorant in 1986 to recognize that PCs and Macs counted as "real computers", that I would agree with. :-)
I do remember 1986--I was in college then--and it wasn't that bad. (Though your description was very entertaining.) PCs with modems existed in the late 1970's--a friend's father had a Commodore PET at that time. Certainly by the mid-1980s, with the IBM PC and clones going strong and Apple having released several different lines including the original Macs, computers were no longer just "huge corporate things".