Questions from alum who graduated before the internet ('94)

Actually back in the early 90s the only students on campus who had computers were engineering majors for the most part. Most of the guys on my floor freshman year didn't have them. I think sometime in the early 90s VT started requiring that all incoming students in the COE have a personal computer. They didn't require that all incoming freshman in other majors have a PC until 1998.

I was in the college of Ag and didn't have one for my first three years at VT. A lot of students didn't have them back then because they were so expensive. When I was a freshman at VT in 1991 a new IBM clone with a 486 processor cost a little over $5,000.00 (or about what a decent used car cost back then). That $5000 in 1991 is the equivalent of nearly $10K in today's dollars so most college kids (or their parents) simply couldn't afford them.

My freshman roommate who was majoring in business had a Macintosh Plus with a 9" monocrome display hooked to a dot matrix printer. All I ever saw him use it for was word processing, I don't think it was capable of much else. I typed term papers on an electric typewriter, or used the IBM PCs next door in the computer lab in Hutcheson after I took a computer class my first semester and learned how to use computers. The rural high school I graduated from still didn't have any computers in classrooms when I graduated in 1991. We didn't have one at home either so I had never even used a computer before arriving at VT.

When I came back to VT for grad-school in 1999 I had Ethernet at my apartment in Foxridge and used the internet quite a bit for research and class projects and even took a couple of courses online. No smart phones back then though, just a cell phone (we called them car phones) bolted into my car. lol

/r/VirginiaTech Thread Parent