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Comment by randallsquared | Hacker News Reader

> "a computer" was required at college

In 1990? No way. I was taking college courses (for HS credit) in 1990, and the first I heard of a requirement to bring your own computer was years after that.

Another thing that skews the numbers is that my household during the 80s had two Color Computers, a C64, and an Amiga 500, but no one else in my social circle had anything more general than a Nintendo or Atari console.

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I was in college in the latter half of 1980s. Computers were very much in use at the time for writing papers, and some classes required them for other work. Students were not expected to actually own one, however -- they would go to labs around campus which were basially just rooms full of PCs loaded up with all the common software.

Computer Science courses generally just required a remote dumb terminal, such as a VT100 or ADM 3a. These were available in a few rooms around campus as well.

I went to grad school for business in the mid-80s. I had a computer but I doubt there were more than a handful of other people in my class who had one. While I was there they went from a very limited computer lab in the basement with a few Macs, a Lisa!, and some DEC terminals to a much bigger lab of 286s off the library.

I was a freshman in nerd school in 1986. Out of the 8 frosh on my hall, only 2 had their own computers (I was not one of them). I don't think any of the seniors in the singles on the other side of the hall had computers either.

In UK universities at least, circa 1990 we had computer labs/rooms which were home to dumb terminals, or if you were lucky, Atari STs running a terminal emulator. Some of us brought our home computers to university, they were mostly Atari STs and Amigas - I actually lugged my Amstrad CPC6128 and colour monitor to campus, but never used it for course work as there was no networking in the dorm rooms. Some new-build rooms had it by 1990, and a few people had PCs linked to it by then, but only used as terminals to the mainframes and minis on the campus network.

One person on my course caused a minor stir by bringing a "laptop" to a lecture to take notes in about 1991 - the keyboard was so noisy that they only did it once!

I graduated in 1990 and owning a personal computer capable of running a C or Pascal compiler useful for academic work was an impossible dream. I was lucky enough to have an Amiga, but a C compiler such as Aztec C cost serious money back then. Open source existed but GCC started out on Vax and even by 1990 I think it only ran on very expensive systems like Unix minis and workstations.

As late as the mid-90s in California, some kids showed up at university without a computer. There were PC and Mac labs on campus that were open pretty late, as well as VT100 terminal labs open 24/7 (though these were only used by most students to check email between classes and were on the way out).

All engineering students had a computer, though.

Even in 2000 computers weren’t required - the school had a computer lab you could use if needed, and it was only a few years before that they had begun requiring essays and papers to be printed from a computer.

My sister had a “word processor” for college in the mid 90s, it did spreadsheet stuff and had a floppy drive and a monochrome monitor, maybe those count as a computer too?

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