Rice University, 1989-93.
Email was just a toy. I got an account on the Unix system there when I signed up for a FORTRAN 77 class my sophomore year. With it came an email account - the first one I’d ever had. Except for that particular programming class, in which assignments were submitted electronically (a novel thing), email wasn’t used for anything official; communication with professors was done either in person or by telephone.
Email was not a very fast way to reach most of your fellow students. They’d read it - eventually - but it could be days if they didn’t have a specific reason to be doing work over in the computer labs. (This was starting to change by my senior year, but it was still nothing like today.)
University policy at the time even prohibited the sending of email off-campus(!) This may have been officially rescinded while I was still there; it didn’t matter much, as very few of my not-at-Rice friends had email addresses to send anything to. During my senior year, I carried on a few talk sessions with a buddy of mine at MIT while over at the computer lab - it felt like a big deal.
There was no Web as we know it today.
Some students had personal computers in their rooms, but many (such as my Apple) had no connection to the rest of the world. If I typed something up on that thing, I’d take it on a floppy over to the computer labs to print it out. Often it was easier to just do the work over in the Mac lab.
Every on-campus room had a phone. We weren’t on the campus phone system - each room had to activate their line with the phone company just like they were an off-campus apartment. No rooms were wired for internet.
Nobody had cell phones. People just weren’t as immediately-reachable as they are today - we’d never known any different so we didn’t fret about it.
I was an engineering student, and most of the work was done with pencil and paper. Hell, most plots were done by hand on graph paper. For one or two labs we had to use some plotting software, and for the most part it was a royal pain in the ass - it was easier to just whip it out on paper. Like many other things, this had started to change by my senior year.
All of Rice’s “residential colleges” were coed, although a few had only been so for a handful of years when I showed up. No permission was needed to bring guests to your room. (While I was at Rice I visited some friends at Stephen F. Austin State University, and I did need to sign in to visit the room of the female among them.)
After-hours access to campus buildings was gained by swiping one’s university ID through a reader. Exceptions were the several residential colleges constructed in a “motel” style, where rooms opened directly to the outside.
I think my undergraduate years were just at the start of the age when electronic communication became the widespread norm. As such, there was considerable variation from place to place in “connected-ness.” Some of my friends were at schools considerably less “wired” than Rice was. OTOH, right after leaving Rice I started grad school at Caltech, and found a school much more reliant on electronic communication than the one I’d just departed.
