• scottywh@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know how old you are but I lived through a completely different experience than you…

    I’d been selling and repairing computers for 6+ years by 2003 and had been in the workforce many years before that. I can assure you people were definitely using laptops in schools (as I sold them to them)… Maybe not as ubiquitously as they do now but it was already quite common.

    I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree on how much things have changed since then … Now, if you want to go back 30 or 40 years then I can definitely agree we’ve seen some significant changes.

    Hell, the first time I flew out of the country I didn’t even need photo ID much less a passport.

    • Angerona@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Most schools didn’t have Wifi in 2003, so it’s not clear what “using laptops” would’ve been. There were computer labs, sure (mostly desktops).

      Colleges had ethernet jacks in every desk in improved/modern classrooms (and nothing outside of those). The use of laptops in college was already common, in school - not yet.

      Cell phones were already common, but smartphones - not at all. Palm phones were the epitome of “smart phone” - and getting data on/off them was a pain. Many plans still didn’t include unlimited calling. Verizon was innovative with offering unlimited calls to a preselect group of numbers.

      Not sure what your point is about having sold and repaired computers for 6+ years before 2003. Sure, computers had been sold for far longer than that. But we are talking about what was (and wasn’t) commonplace.

      • scottywh@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        In case it still doesn’t occur to you, I pointed out that I’d been in the computer business for a number of years already by then to illustrate that I’d already been selling laptops for years to people who intended to use them in school prior to 2003.

      • scottywh@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.

        WiFi is in no way necessary to take notes, write papers, etcetera.

        College is certainly included in the definition of “school” so that seems a silly separation to try and make.

        Cell phones and smart phones in particular are irrelevant to anything I said.

        Do you have a point or are you just trying to disagree with me?

        • SlothMama@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          My point is that my experience in my life, to now, across two decades, was drastically different. People still didn’t bring a laptop to the community college I went to that year either, I had never seen or heard of it as a practice until later.

          I returned back to school about five years later and laptops in classes was common.

          We somehow seem to have had drastically different experiences she perspectives from a broadly large geographic region.

          For additional perspective my typing class in 1999 used an actual typewriter, not a computer, so socioeconomic factors of my own high school experience and the area I grew up may have actually been that different and potentially atypical to even surrounding areas, it’s hard to tell.