Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I was in high school in the nineties and no one had a laptop in class, then when I went into community college, things like online classes were a novelty, with a handful of offerings and a large computer lab because most people didn't have Internet access at home, so you would do your online work there, or at home and bring it to school to upload on a floppy disk.
This was my regional reality, southeast US, but was very much the experience of tens of thousands up until the period of time, 2003, that you're referring to.
Up until then it was only rich people that had Internet access at home, and most of the people I knew would often lose their lights and phones from their parents not being able to pay for utilities.
Some of my experience is skewed towards poverty because that was the social circle I had, but I still never had the impression that the masses actually had Internet or even laptops at home. Most people did have an offline computer, usually five to eight years old though.
Dude... I wasn't rich and it most certainly wasn't "only rich people" that had internet at home.
Hell, I personally had both cable and DSL in my house from 2000-2003 so my wife downloading wouldn't cause latency issues with my gaming.
I also lived in the southeastern US at the time.