It was a state experiment - Big Boolean had all its money tied up in buying a new coffee-pot for the the engineering department.
The idea behind the experiment was to prepare my generation for... well, basically for now. But parents hated it, because they couldn't help their kids with the homework, so the program got cut - so the cyberpunk future got put off for several more decades, and we all dropped out of school, took bad drugs, and wound up cultivating embarrassing hairstyles and worse sideburns and listening to overblown music with 45-minute drum solos when we were in our 20s.
If madness made us strong, we would all be invincible.