Most schools didn't have Wifi in 2003, so it's not clear what "using laptops" would've been. There were computer labs, sure (mostly desktops).

Colleges had ethernet jacks in every desk in improved/modern classrooms (and nothing outside of those). The use of laptops in college was already common, in school - not yet.

Cell phones were already common, but smartphones - not at all. Palm phones were the epitome of "smart phone" - and getting data on/off them was a pain. Many plans still didn't include unlimited calling. Verizon was innovative with offering unlimited calls to a preselect group of numbers.

Not sure what your point is about having sold and repaired computers for 6+ years before 2003. Sure, computers had been sold for far longer than that. But we are talking about what was (and wasn't) commonplace.

Bro out of that entire list the only one you could contradict was computers, which I definitely don't remember being widespread 20 years ago, and they were certainly nothing like the computers of today in terms of experience. What about, y'know, the whole gay marriage thing? Seems like a pretty dramatic change you've just brushed over.

I was in high school in the nineties and no one had a laptop in class, then when I went into community college, things like online classes were a novelty, with a handful of offerings and a large computer lab because most people didn't have Internet access at home, so you would do your online work there, or at home and bring it to school to upload on a floppy disk.

This was my regional reality, southeast US, but was very much the experience of tens of thousands up until the period of time, 2003, that you're referring to.

Up until then it was only rich people that had Internet access at home, and most of the people I knew would often lose their lights and phones from their parents not being able to pay for utilities.

Some of my experience is skewed towards poverty because that was the social circle I had, but I still never had the impression that the masses actually had Internet or even laptops at home. Most people did have an offline computer, usually five to eight years old though.

In 2005 at a top 50 liberal arts school, I was the only person in almost every class I was in using a laptop to take notes. Huge 200 person lectures there were definitely a few, and in later years I still remember being crazy jealous of a woman who had a laptop with a stylus for drawing econ graphs - one set of classes I wrote manually in - but she was a rarity. My notes were always highly sought after for sharing because I'd have 4 pages typed instead of 2 scrawled and not keeping up.