There wasn’t a lot of benefit in having a laptop until wifi became ubiquitous in lecture halls, libraries and cafes.
Probably around 2010 was when you could expect to find reliable wifi on most college campuses.
I remember the first time browsing the internet using wifi. It seemed like magic.
I can’t really say, but I graduated in 2007 and it was still unusual to see someone taking notes (even in tech classes) using a laptop. Maybe that will help.
I graduated a few years earlier, but this was my experience as well. So much pseudo code written out on paper…
i am currently studying computer science. the exams last semester were all on paper. such a pain to write java and sql code with your hand and without autocomplete :D
I was in college at the time working at the university student computing labs. It was the iBook in 1999 and the few years thereafter. Up until then average students kept their computers in their dorm or just used the campus labs. All of the sudden laptops were seen as something other than 90s briefcases. The computer labs started to empty and all of the sudden profs were mentioning laptop policies in syllabi.
Was there ever a time that desktops were commonly taken to college? Maybe some specific computer-heavy degrees like CS or something. My older sister took a laptop to college before the majority of families had a home PC of any sort.
All that was in dorm rooms when I went were desktops running Napster.
There was a point when laptops were uncommon, and a point prior to that when they didn’t exist.
Obviously laptops haven’t existed forever. But was there ever a time when large quantities of college students had their own PCs?
Laptops followed on the tail of home PCs pretty closely. I don’t recall a time when PCs were ubiquitous at colleges and laptops were not.
Late 90s, sure.
I mean, yeah, it’s useful for computer science students, but remember that just about everyone has to do things like write papers. If you don’t have a computer, you’re stuck doing everything in a computer lab somewhere.
Not to mention spreadsheets for various fields, a bunch of engineering stuff. Email is a common communication mechanism. College dorms were one place where you were likely gonna have fast Internet access.
When I went to college, 100% of students had PCs, and almost nobody had a laptop.
By my last year, there were more laptops around.
2001-2005
Not really. I was in college in the early to mid 90s. One of my fellow CS students had a NeXT cause he was loaded but the rest of us just used the computer labs.
I started college in 2007, and I only had a laptop.
I matriculated in 2002, and I had a laptop.
When I left for college in 1997 I had a a laptop, but other than taking up less room in the car, it was a desktop. A 486slc/33 with, I want to say, 4mb of ram and a 200mb hard drive. If ran Dos 6.22 and Win 3.1.
I was over the moon to get the all clear to replace it with a K6/200 tower with 32mb of ram and a 2.1 gb hard drive. Freaking GIGABYTES man!
By the time I started law school five years later I needed a laptop (a lilac colored magnesium P3 Sony that was a bit long in the tooth when I got it from some overstock site but was built like a brick shithouse). It ran Win ME, which was less miserable than you may have heard, but was indeed pointless and buggy. WiFi was a brand new addition to most of the campus, and we all had various antennas sticking out of our PC cards slots.
I would say late 2000s
2005 was when I saw a big push towards laptops.
I graduated 2006 and my college has WiFi all over so early-2000s?
Daughter was given a laptop at admission to the Air Force Academy in 1996, but I was envious… Didn’t get my first laptop until about three years later.
~2003
I took a laptop to college in 2003 for note-taking. It was very rare, maybe 1 or 2 in the lecture hall. In a CompSci programme.
Right. Maybe I was a bit early. Even a few years later it wasn’t like Laptops had touchscreens and you could scribble down notes. For maths-heavy programmes like CS only the 2 LaTeX nerds were able able to copy the equations and you also needed to learn TikZ or something to make diagrams. I bought a Thinkpad X61T with pen in 2008. But even then it wasn’t a common thing.
