# Did most college students in the early 90s have email? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 20, 2015, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666 "2015-07-20T05:12:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![protoboard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@protoboard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/protoboard)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/1 "2015-07-20T05:12:57Z")
Would you say if you were in college in 1992 in the US or Canada, there was more than a 50 percent chance you would have had a student email address and Internet/Web access on campus? ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 5:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/2 "2015-07-20T05:53:36Z")
I did (and I still have my 1991-vintage emails) but I don’t know how universal it was even on our own campus. I wasn’t introduced to the existence of mine (and how to use it) until a 3rd semester course, for instance. ---
**Author:** ![installLSC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/54ee81/32.png) [@installLSC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/installLSC)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/3 "2015-07-20T05:56:00Z")
By the time I went to college in January 1994, at least one class _required_ you to have email because that’s how lesson plans and such were sent to students. ---
**Author:** ![protoboard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@protoboard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/protoboard)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 6:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/4 "2015-07-20T06:09:04Z")
> [@installLSC](#): > > By the time I went to college in January 1994, at least one class _required_ you to have email because that’s how lesson plans and such were sent to students. Were you required to own a computer at home too, then? Back in 1994 only about 25-30% of people in the US owned their own computer, so that would be surprising to me, unless they expected you to check in the lab. ---
**Author:** ![Vaevictis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f04885/32.png) [@Vaevictis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Vaevictis)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 6:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/5 "2015-07-20T06:10:07Z")
Entered college 1991, first class at that institution that had automatic email account for everyone. A decent number of people did not use it, not sure about a ballpark percentage though. ---
**Author:** ![bengangmo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/50afbb/32.png) [@bengangmo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bengangmo)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 6:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/6 "2015-07-20T06:26:02Z")
I had one issued by my Uni in 1993. Every student was issued with an account and email address then ---
**Author:** ![dofe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7ba0ec/32.png) [@dofe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dofe)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 6:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/7 "2015-07-20T06:28:21Z")
By the time I started college in 1995, all the students in my entering class were required to have email at the beginning of the academic quarter. I don’t know if we were the first class to require email for everyone. I also did not have a computer, but instead checked my email at the computer lab on campus. ---
**Author:** ![Carl\_Pham](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e9a140/32.png) [@Carl\_Pham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Carl_Pham)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 7:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/8 "2015-07-20T07:05:59Z")
My recollection is that it started to come in around 1985. When I started in 1980 it was still rare. ---
**Author:** ![protoboard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@protoboard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/protoboard)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 7:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/9 "2015-07-20T07:34:15Z")
> [@Carl\_Pham](#): > > My recollection is that it started to come in around 1985. When I started in 1980 it was still rare. Wow, that early? Interesting. I was thinking more like about ~1991, aside from maybe professors at colleges and certain fields like physics. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 7:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/10 "2015-07-20T07:36:20Z")
I would say that it didn’t become standard until 1994-1995. ---
**Author:** ![protoboard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@protoboard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/protoboard)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 7:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/11 "2015-07-20T07:54:02Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > I would say that it didn’t become standard until 1994-1995. Web-based email, or moreso intranet/UUCP etc? ---
**Author:** ![Student\_Driver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/3da27b/32.png) [@Student\_Driver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Student_Driver)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 7:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/12 "2015-07-20T07:59:48Z")
Friends of mine who attended the local university had email on an internal system (8 characters in length, at first it was first initial, middle initial if any, then the first six letters of the last name), and a BBS for student interaction. It was connected to the Internet sometime in the 80s (one had to append “in%” in front of the address to indicate it wasn’t an internal email. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 8:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/13 "2015-07-20T08:56:25Z")
> [@protoboard](#): > > Web-based email, or moreso intranet/UUCP etc? Possibly some hybrid of all that. I worked for a hi-tech company in Silicon Gulch, 1984-1987. We had no direct internet connection, but we had UUCP and Usenet. So we had UUCP style e-mail. Of course, somewhere upstream of us was some site with a gateway to the real Internet, so we could send and receive Internet e-mails through that. If college campuses had UUCP connections to the outside world, they would have had indirect Internet e-mail that way. ETA: But I don’t think you would call that “web-based”, in the modern sense of, e.g., Yahoo mail or gMail. Although the Internet was well established by then, the “World Wide Web” was first proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Before that, e-mails went direct from end-user system to end-user system, and your own site hosted its own e-mails. ---
**Author:** ![coremelt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4491bb/32.png) [@coremelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coremelt)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 9:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/14 "2015-07-20T09:38:59Z")
I graduated from the University of Wollongong in Australia in 1991 with a Science Degree and did my second year as an exchange student at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (home of NCSA Mosaic!). Both universities issued me email addresses however I was taking comp sci classes, not 100 sure if they were doing that for all students or not. In my case actually accessing email was done by telnetting into a SunOS sparc server and using ELM text email client. They had labs of both dumb terminals to let you connect to the Sparc Servers and some DOS based labs with Telnet clients. 20 years later I still remember the VI command set. ---
**Author:** ![Francis\_Vaughan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/francis_vaughan/32/3093_2.png) [@Francis\_Vaughan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Francis_Vaughan)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 10:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/15 "2015-07-20T10:01:02Z")
I got my first useful email (as in internationally mailable) in about 1983, which was part of the ACSNet mail system built in Australia. In about 1986 the Australian universities own internet connected to the Internet, and we migrated to email over that. I think I had a UUCP style email address somewhere in there as well. Email was available to undergraduate computer science students for internal use very early on - but as to a useful internationally available service for all students in the university, that would have been late 90’s. At my old uni there was a student run service that provided email accounts in the interim, and sometimes ran very close to the edge of trouble. The late adoption was more a matter of access to computers and of intransigence from the usual bureaucrats. ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 10:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/16 "2015-07-20T10:22:50Z")
I graduated from University in 1993 - generally speaking, if you were a Comp Sci or Physics student you had a University email, but I’m not sure it went much further than that. This was in the UK Direct quote from a former housemate when I emailed him some years later for a catch up - “You know, I remember when email was that weird shit that only you knew about. And now we can’t do without it!” He was a fine arts student… ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 10:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/17 "2015-07-20T10:42:37Z")
> [@protoboard](#): > > Were you required to own a computer at home too, then? I doubt they had that expectation. I was a freshman in 1995 and while we all were assigned an e-mail address there was no expectation that all the students had a computer. If you didn’t, you checked your e-mail in the computer labs or in the terminals in the hallways of both the dining halls and academic buildings. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 10:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/18 "2015-07-20T10:47:57Z")
> [@protoboard](#): > > Were you required to own a computer at home too, then? Back in 1994 only about 25-30% of people in the US owned their own computer, so that would be surprising to me, unless they expected you to check in the lab. I still see plenty of computer labs at schools, so I imagine one could get through without one. I wonder what the graph of % ownership vs time looks like for students. Probably has an inflection point, but I’m not sure when. It may be similar, but with a different timing, for email. I know I saw an inflection point for college student cell phone ownership. ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 11:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/19 "2015-07-20T11:18:16Z")
In college in 1980 we had Vax mail. Every student and teacher had access to an internal email system on the college Vax system. When I started working full time in 1984 we had the exact same internal Vax mail system. It wasn’t until about 1993 that the Vax mail system got replaced with email when we switched from dumb desktop terminals to PCs. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 11:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666/20 "2015-07-20T11:22:13Z")
I graduated from undergrad in 1992, and entered grad school the same year. Both were rather tech-savvy universities. Bases merely on my experience – not a scientific study – I would say that the 50% threshold proposed by the OP for that year is just about right. (For example, I recall a professor recommending I get an email account in early 1991, but I didn’t actually get one until late 1993, when a fellow student strongly advised it). [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-most-college-students-in-the-early-90s-have-email/725666.md?page=2)