This was the same at my small liberal arts college (in the US). I don’t know what it might have been like at much larger universities or outside the US.
Whatever kind that wasn’t simply messaging with other people on a specific network but could be used to communicate with anyone in the Internet.
Hotmail started in 1996, there were a few earlier attempts but that was the start of wide spread Web based email.
Prior to 1996 using email meant using a dedicated mail client, either a text based one on a unix server that you connected to or windows/mac based eudora.
I was a freshman in '93, and we all were issued email addresses. I seem to remember most, if not all, of my friends at other universities at the time also having email addresses. No, you were not expected to own your own computer–neither I nor my roommate did. (And I never had a computer through my four and a half years of college). I just used the computer lab, and there were also terminals at the library where you can check your email, which is where I checked it 95% of the time.
At the college I was teaching at in the late 80’s, all students were given an account on the main university computer, which meant they also had an email address. It was also used for class signup and such. They could log in at any of the general computer labs around campus. There was dialup into the system as well.
Most email was “local”. I don’t think many people did UUCP mail but we had it. We were on NSFNet (which allowed access to ARPANet), so email thru that was simple.
When I was in freshman orientation in 1997 at Kent State, they asked how many of us had and used email and only about 10% of us raised our hands. I was shocked. I think I was using Yahoo at the time.
We got an email address (that I still use today!) and a copy of the mail client Eudora on a floppy disc that we could check and use on university computers. I still use Eudora too lol
I was a bit later than the question, but everyone at my school (Cornell) had an e-mail address issued immediately upon arrival to campus (I actually think I got a letter with it prior to arriving to be honest). This was in the fall of 1996. All of my friends also had school e-mail address, as any number of institutions, so by then, at least, it was very standard.
One cool thing is that my university e-mail address is still active (it’s for life), though I just forward it to my regularly used account now.
Ours was hosted on an IBM 3090 and it was mostly used for local email; about 2 months after I started using it to email my professor and others in my class, someone gave me signup instructions for a LISTSERV based email Digest that had participants from universities (and elsewhere) all over the world and I learned how to address emails to people whose email account was not on our own server.
This was not only internet; internet had a competitor back then! Bitnet! I was ahunter@ccvm.sunysb.edu on internet and ahunter@sbccvm on bitnet.
There was no webmail; there was scarcely a web. One lone Mac in a sea of IBM PCs used as terminals, and the Mac had Mosaic loaded onto it. (more usefully, it had Fetch, which enabled me to download shareware from the Info-Mac archives).
Started at the University of Michigan in fall of '93, and was issued an email address (at that point, we all got to pick our username/email address; for later classes the university issued the address by first initial and last name). This was the first email address my friends and I ever had. For the first year, we mostly used to to circulate “your mama” jokes.
I started college in 1988. Email accounts were available but you had to go to the computer center to sign up, and I only knew one person who had an email address so while I did sign up for an account I never used it. Owning a computer wasn’t that common, so in order to send/receive mail I would have had to go to one of the labs whose computers had an internet connection - most didn’t, they were just on a local network for printing.
I started actually using email when I got my first “real” job at the university, right after graduation in 1992. There was a push that year to assign net accounts to all members of the university.
I attended community college in a suburb of Chicago beginning in 1992, and there was no email given, nor an expectation that you would have one. My first email was entirely separate from school and was obtained from aol in 1997 (I only remember that because I made it ___97@aol.com)
I went back to community college in 2006, this time in Chicago, and there was still nothing really done by email. I can’t even remember if they gave us .edu emails or not. I never used it if they did. I think they must have, because I remember a couple of teachers passing around a paper and asking us to write down our “real” email for them, the email that we’d actually check once in a while, as opposed to the school issued one.
In 2012 I enrolled in an online BSN program, and for this one, you have to use the school issued email, no exceptions. All communication with teachers and advisers is done either by phone or the school issued email.
As a freshman at an engineering school in 1988, I was issued an e-mail address in my required computer programming class(FORTRAN). The school was on the Bitnet, and the usernames were 4 character alphanumeric groups assigned sequentially by last name. Mine was F4ND@xxx.bitnet. had that same address throughout college.
Maybe it was de rigeur in universities by then (and for Tech schools/courses perhaps a bit earlier in the late 1980s), but not in CC’s?
Though, I do wonder how many university students USED their email accounts, as opposed to were simply given one.
I graduated from undergrad in 1995 and only a small fraction of the students had an e-mail account. I did but it was a Unix based account that I could only be accessed from the labs that I worked in. It certainly wasn’t something that I checked more than once a week or so and I only sent a few messages from it because I didn’t know many other people with active e-mail accounts and it wasn’t that easy to use.
The first time I saw e-mail in widespread use was went I went to grad school at Dartmouth also starting in 1995. Dartmouth required all students to buy a Mac and they had their own proprietary e-mail system called Blitzmail that was much more modern than e-mail systems that were common at the time. Everyone used Blitzmail for everything but that was rather unusual for the period.
I certainly wouldn’t say that 50% of students of students had e-mail in the early 90’s. I am sure it varied greatly by school but that is a little too early to reach that level based on the technology that was most common then. A few places like Dartmouth were early adopters but that wasn’t typical across all schools.
No, because we were one of those colleges (a small liberal arts college) that required underclassmen to live on campus, so the computer labs on campus were both large and busy virtually the entire day. I received my messages via intranet, but I don’t know if getting them via the WWW was an option or how off campus students received their emails.
In '93 we could dial into the network servers if we wanted to check our emails off-site. (Or if we have any other internet access point, we could, of course, telnet to our server.)
I remember checking my email from a Commodore 64 at my cousin’s house. The formatting was a bit off because it only had a 40-column display, but I could use elm or pine (two email clients) just fine.
The basic command set of vi was very well laid out and logical, and the orthogonal construction of its commands made it very intuitive, at least for the most important commands.
vi was the first full-screen style editor that I met. Another employee was showing me the basics. After he showed me just about 5 commands, I immediately began guessing, correctly, a great many more, which totally blew his mind.
I started college in the summer of '93. I had email on the University’s VAX/VMS system. The next year we switched to Unix machines and I was able to use the Pine e-mail client. I was very happy about that, e-mail on VAX sucked.
I started university in 1990 and 100% of us had e-mail because it was automatically created for you when you enrolled.
I doubt most of us ever used it in 1990, but the number would have gone up exponentially every year.
Started college in Fall of 1991. Everyone had an email address assigned, but there really wasn’t much to use them for outside of the campus, and they were either Unix or Vax system hosted, so you had to either have a dumb terminal, or use the 9600 baud dial-up and a terminal emulator.
Most people didn’t give enough of a shit about it to bother until a couple of years later, when the Web became a phenomenon, and people started actually using their various accounts, rather than just letting them languish. ISTR that Trumpet Winsock came out about 1992-1993, and that really opened up the doors- people didn’t have to telnet into Vax or Unix systems and use Gopher to find stuff out. You could fire up the dial up connection on your Windows 3.1 computer and use GUI apps to do your web surfing and email- POP3 clients for Windows also became widely available around that same time.
I don’t remember email being a common method of communication at all in college, except within the computer science department, where you were expected to be able to email with proficiency, and have taken a side between vi and Emacs as your editor. Most of us used elm for email though.