LOL... I was just barely behind you... College 96-00.
Had my own PC, but then I was already a computer geek and going into electrical engineering, so that was pretty much a necessity.
This is something that has always fascinated me, the speed at which computers became prevalent.
I graduated HS in 1993 which was just before the release of Netscape Navigator. Back then I knew a couple people who had PC's in their houses but with barely any internet* it was only worthwhile if you were running a business doing payroll or something like that. A lot of people had word processors which at your age (just three years younger), you probably barely even remember.
A couple quick anecdotes:
When I moved in to my dorm freshman year at Ohio State in September, 1993 I was on a floor that (guessing, this was 30 years ago) had about 70 guys living on it. Out of all 70 of us, ONE guy had a PC. Then there were two or three word processors.
My brother is 5-1/2 years younger than me and was six grades behind me in school. In September, 1999 I helped move him into his dorm at Ohio State. He lived in a room that was like a suite with four guys. They had two bedrooms and a shared common area and bathroom. Between them those four guys had FIVE computers (all four had PC's and one also had a laptop). So between 1993 and 1999 the ratio of Computers to Students that I anecdotally observed increased from 1:70 to 5:4. That is insane.
Second anecdote, chatrooms:
One evening during my sophomore year at Ohio State some friends of mine and I went to visit a girl I had known in HS and her roommates. We (guys) were all sophomores and the girls were all freshman, ONE year younger. So we get there and they are in something on AOL called a "chatroom". We (remember, only ONE year older) had literally never heard of such a thing and couldn't figure out why anyone would spend time in one.
*Pre-Netscape Internet:
Netscape was a modern-ish browser. If you could make an early-90's version of it work today, a modern person would recognize the basic arrangement. Prior to netscape (ie, when I was in HS) there was an internet but only serious computer geeks were on it. There were no search engines and the interface was just text on black screen so it was useless unless you REALLY knew what you were doing and even then it was only somewhat useful compared to today's internet.
And I was *all* about the Zipdrive... One of the engineering labs had them on their PC, and had a BLAZING fast internet connection, so guess how I built my MP3 collection at the time 
That zip disc was a gigantic improvement.
Ohio State's email program when I was in school was I think called Eudora or something like that. I mentioned that you HAD to have a disc in order to access it. That was because storage was expensive enough that the University refused to store your incoming or outgoing messages after you received or sent them. To keep that off of their storage they dumped your incoming messages to your disc then deleted them from their servers to free up space. Similarly, your outgoing messages sent from your disc to the University's servers then out and the University immediately deleted them.
If you lost or damaged your disc (this happened more than once to me) all of your old messages were just gone. You had to get a new disc and then when you signed in you'd get your new messages but you would NOT get anything that had previously been downloaded to your old disc.
The other thing was that when you were "ON" your email, it wasn't "live". I would go to the computer lab, put my disc in, and hit "send/retrieve". Any outgoing messages that I hadn't already sent would be sent and any incoming messages that I hadn't previously received would be loaded to my disc. Then when I was "on" my email, I was just working on my disc. So if I had a message from you, a message from
@utee94 , a message from my dad (my brother had gotten him onto email), and a message from my brother, I'd answer but my answers weren't "sent" they were just pushed to the "outbox" on my disc. Then, before I left I needed to remember to hit "send/retrieve" again so that those four messages would send. More than once I forgot that step and then went back a day or two later and couldn't understand why someone I had typed an email to hadn't replied yet. Duh, it was because I had typed but not sent my email.
Even if something like this still existed, a modern programmer would obviously include a prompt at log-out to remind you that you had unsent messages in your outbox but back then there was no such thing. If you forgot to hit "send/retrieve" and just logged out your messages just sat on your disc until the next time you logged in and hit send/retrieve. If you lost or damaged your disc in the meantime, your messages just disappeared.
Initially I was doing all of this on the old 3.5" 1.44mb floppy discs. 1.44mb actually sounded like a lot to us back then but if you were relatively active on email it filled up pretty quickly and you'd have to go through and purge old messages to make room for new ones.
The other problem with the 3.5" floppy discs was that they were NOT very robust. Since you had to carry your email disc with you all the time I knew a lot of people at tOSU who either lost or damaged theirs. I remember when I first saw an Iomega Zip Disc. I was at Long's Bookstore (famous long-term store across the street from the Ohio State campus) and next to the 3.5" floppy discs they had this thing that was roughly the same size but had a hard shell case and held 70x the data. I think I paid $150 for mine and used it for my email for the rest of my time at Ohio State.
