Yeah, you're the same age as my older sister (also '75), while I was '78. I do think there was a big difference, even between the two of us.
I don't think she interacted with the home computer much in high school except for word processing. So for her it was a fancy typewriter. In the one year she attended college (lol), I don't think it was very common for students to have their own PC yet. But by my freshman year, it was very common. And then email was JUST starting to come on in regular usage while I was in college. I couldn't email my parents--they sure as hell didn't have email. I'm pretty sure I couldn't even email my sister at that point. Although she and her BF (now husband) were operating his marina on Lake of the Ozarks at the time, I'm not sure they had email accounts associated even with the business.
Now, part of the difference between my sister and I, like utee's experience, is that I was a techie nerd even back in high school. My sister is very smart, but she is absolutely NOT a techie nerd. She's the opposite. So it's possible I was simultaneously ahead of this curve, while my sister was behind it. I think you may have made use of that early-mid 90s connectivity and internet in a way that I did and she didn't, despite you being the same age ahead of me as she was.
But I still consider it wild the degree and the speed at which it changed the world. And then advance another decade and you add the smartphone... Someone who lived in 1920 might recognize the world of 1980. Probably the biggest changes in those 6 decades was TV, widespread electrification, and air travel. Someone who lived in 1970 would probably not recognize the world of 2023. We carry around, in our pockets, a portable communication device that can give us access to nearly all of the world's information... In seconds..
I went to a small school district in a small town. We had like 180-200 people in our graduating class. We had computers in intermediate school (5th and 6th grade). The lovely Apple IIe. Damn those things were hardy. We also used them in junior high, we used visicalc and that was the first time I heard the term spreadsheet.
We played Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. I got my first computer around about 1986, the most popular home computer ever made, the Commodore 64. We mostly used it to play games, but I did tinker with simple programs from BASIC just copying the lines in the manual. But it was cool anyways.
When I was in HS I clearly remember there being a lot of talk about the "Information Superhighway", especially during the '92 Presidential election. We had no idea what that meant. It was all futuristic sounding, but nobody knew anything about the internet or email or anything.
I learned to type on an electric typewriter. I actually am quite good at typing, it's one of my best skills. This was about 1992, or 10th grade. We also had computers at school, 386 machines that we used to do word processing on. I did take a computer programming class, Pascal. We totally blew it off and didn't do shit and I've never actually even heard of the Pascal language outside of that one class.
In 1994 my first year of college (Junior College at that) one of my professors was writing her information on the board and she put down her email address. I had no idea what it was or how to use it. That was the first time I recall seeing the @ symbol used that way. Up until that point, the @ symbol was rarely used in my world. We got a PC about that time, a 2nd hand 386 computer that had a dial up modem we used to connect to BBS and not much else.
It seems like between about 1994-1995 things really took off with the internet. Netscape became a big thing, and we could get on the internet at college on 486 PC's. I transferred to A&M in 1996 and we had dial up internet included with our student fees ( I lived off campus, no ethernet for me). I had a class in '96 or '97 where we had to do our chemistry homework on-line. That was tough because you had to get all the units etc right. I got my first real PC in 1996 or maybe early 1997, a Packard Bell 133 MHZ Pentium with 4 MB of memory. I made my first online purchase around Y2k, maybe 1999 where I bought the components and built a PC. It was a P3 750 MHZ with maybe 64 MB of RAM.
It seems like within about 3-5 years the internet really took off, from about late 94-98 or so a lot of stuff moved online. We had dialup internet at my house after college until at least the mid 2000's, maybe until like 2007/2008. I really don't remember but having high speed (2-3 MBps) back then was a real game changer.
