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[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]

I was the HS class of 1998 at an affluent private school. By the mid 90s most families had a family computer at home, but not everyone did. And few students had their own actual computers, it was notable if someone did. When I went to an Ivy in the fall of 1998, like many if not most of my classmates, it marked the first time I had my own computer. And even then not every student had one, there were still students relying on the university computer labs. Come to think of it, it was a bit of a social thing to go down to one of the labs and do homework on the lab computers instead of your machine in your room.

The transition to college put you in a different place with computers but in high schools of the 1990s we were not dependent on computers and the kids who were enamored of computers were seen, unfairly perhaps, in an unflattering light. Which is borne out by the stereotypes of the sitcoms and movies of the time. We have to remember that computers were expensive, much more expensive than they are, I vaguely remember my parents paying $2,000 for a desktop in the mid 1990s and to use as a comparison point, my school fees that year would have been $10,000, the same school is now $42,000 while you would pay $1800 for an Apple desktop. But I do also emphasize that things changed greatly within a few years. 
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