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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why are you all wasting your time on this weird thing called the... uh... internet? That's for the dweebs and dorks in the computer lab in the basement. I mean, computers? Come on. I have a real life to live, thank you. [/quote]

I'm 51, and I feel like by 1996 people my age had fully embraced the internet and did not consider it for dweebs and dorks.[/quote]\

I was in high school in 1996, most of us didn't have our own email addresses and computers meant usually the one family computer you shared with your parents and reluctantly typed papers on it. Some guys were playing video games like SimCity but still used nintendo . The school had a computer lab that attracted a certain personality.

Do not doubt adults used computers differently, my father was already emailing extensively due to work and this would be the pre frames so no graphics. I vaguely remember looking at college websites in '96-'97 that had no real photos, just pages of links. Things drastically changed within a few years but if you were a non computer person, like most of us were in school, computers would be somewhat a dorky thing. Not "cool."

I also remember the school deciding it was important to have a computer in every classroom and the day came when it happened and most of the teachers looked around and said, ok, now what do we do with this thing? And we were a high performing school![/quote]

What??? I was in college from 1990 to 1994 and everyone I knew had a computer.  My college had a “subsidies” loan so you could buy one for $2K at 12% interest.  We didn’t have emails then but we did have an online college based electronic communication system — I can’t remember what it was called but it was wildly popular.  Computers were definitely not for dorks.  I started law school in 1996 and most of our exams were take home on a computer.  I feel like you are a full decade off on your assessment.  We definitely all had school emails.[/quote]

Pine was the accessible email client on a UNIX system. I had to teach every incoming student how to use it. Over a week of 8-10 one hour sessions to get everyone through it. It was easier than the mainframe system. Business and law schools later adopted group wise which would crash whenever someone sent to a large group where several people had vacation messages.[/quote]

In 1992 I was a grad student, got admitted a week before the semester started and I had a job 24 hrs a week I finished my 2 weeks notice for so I missed a lot of the new student orientation for. I'd been out of school for 2 years and was part time before that as a mom with a baby. I'd done some programming courses on mainframe but that was wall.

So I missed the session where they taught us how to use the email, then could figure it out. I was also one of only 2 women students in my dept (one woman lecturer who was in her 60s, no women professors) and the other was a few years into her doctoral program. I was also older than many of the first year guys and had a young child at home to tend to.

I faked it until Xmas when I vowed I would learn how to use email. Went to the library and called the IT center help. Woman who answered said in a condescending voice "it's a MENU based system" which meant nothing to me. I hung up and called again and got an older man who walked me through it. I remember also doing some stuff on the world wide web before there was a graphic interface. And cautions from a professor about how you had to be careful not to accidentally send an email to the whole world. A couple years later some lawyer in California shocked the internet by sending a solicitation email to, I believe, the entire US and internet users were scandalized about their using the internet for a commercial purpose. [/quote]

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