• Vanth@reddthat.com
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      8 months ago

      There was a point when laptops were uncommon, and a point prior to that when they didn’t exist.

      • Vanth@reddthat.com
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        8 months ago

        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.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          8 months ago

          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.

        • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          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

    • Tolstoshev@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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.