So far, I am thinking of setting ONE BLOOD in 1996-7. I’ve even printed out calendars of those years. 1996 syncs up especially well with the days on which I have things happening in the book–for example, I have Halloween falling on a Thursday, so that it’s followed by one work day. But those things aren’t crucial…
If I continue with this approach, the tricky thing will be to avoid anachronisms, and make sure I don’t have buildings in existence in Princeton that weren’t built yet (such as the big, new public library downtown, which only dates from 2004) or technology too advanced for the period. Just as it was hard for me to envision rampant cell phone and laptop use in 2000, it’s hard for me to remember NOT to include some of those things now.
One question I can throw out, to those who might have still been in college in 1996-7, or had kids in college then: Would some Ivy League students already be using laptops in the classroom, or would they still be taking notes mostly by hand? (Even if you didn’t go to that kind of school, you can probably guess whether wealthy kids would have had access to those things.) Thanks for any tips you can give me!
About Eileen Watkins
Eileen F. Watkins specializes in mystery and suspense fiction. In 2017 she launched the Cat Groomer Mysteries, from Kensington Publishing, with THE PERSIAN ALWAYS MEOWS TWICE. This was followed by THE BENGAL IDENTITY and FERAL ATTRACTION in 2018, and GONE, KITTY, GONE in 2019; CLAW & DISORDER comes out in early 2021. Eileen previously published eight novels with Amber Quill Press, chiefly paranormal suspense (as E. F. Watkins), including the Quinn Matthews Haunting Mysteries. The first of those, DARK MUSIC, received the David G. Sasher Award at the 2014 Deadly Ink Mystery Conference. The second, HEX, DEATH & ROCK ‘N’ ROLL, was a Mystery finalist for the 2014 Next Generation EBook Awards.Eileen is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Cat Writers Association. She serves as publicist for Sisters in Crime Central Jersey and also for New Jersey’s annual Deadly Ink Mystery Conference. Eileen comes from a journalistic background, having written on art, architecture, interior design and home improvement for daily newspapers and major magazines. Besides these topics, her interests include the paranormal and spirituality, as well as animal training and rescue. She is seldom without at least one cat in the house and regularly frequents the nearest riding stable. Visit her web site at www.efwatkins.com.
I graduated during that time with a Computer Science degree. Yes there were laptops but very few students had them. None of students had one who were going for my degree. We used desktops in computer labs at school and if we were lucky enough we had a computer at home and the dorm. Mainframes and PC were what we used.
I worked too and laptops weren’t even popular then.
Yes, we took notes in class.
Hope this helps … I was at Wright State University and Capital University in Ohio. Back then Wright State was one of the top 10 schools in the country for Computer Science degress. Now … who knows.
Very helpful, thanks. If students in Computer Science weren’t using laptops, they probably would have been ever rarer in other classes. The only hitch now is, information I was going to have one student another electronically in class will have to be communicated some other way. But it’s no biggie.
I started college in 1993, and started law school in 2006. Back in the 90s, laptops weren’t being used on campuses in any significant numbers. (I went to rutgers, but new plenty of people in the ivies.) They showed up every now and then, but many students didn’t even have desktop computers – hence the huge campus computer labs that got set up.
There were basically two reasons for this – first, expense; laptops at that point were a lousy value proposition. You’d be getting half the computer for twice as much money, and if it broke (which happens a lot) rather than replacing the $50 broken part (as you could with a desktop) you’d be in for very expensive repairs. Second, infrastructure – today, most campuses have wireless networking covering the campus, and many classrooms have outlets at convenient locations.
So no, in ’96 it was unlikely that even the wealthiest schools had a lot of laptops in use. My wife went to Cornell law school, class of ’05 (I’m assuming that law schools, in general, are going to be wealthier than undergrad institutions) and when she went, laptops were far from universal. By the time I went to law school, five years later, adoption was 98%+, and a laptop purchase program was an option part of the financial aid package.
Two things happened in that time period – first, Apple made their laptops cool and sexy, and other companies followed; second, large corporations realized that they were spending millions on electricity bills. In response to that, chipmakers started working hard on reducing power consumption – which, though not intended for laptops, made laptops a much more viable proposition. Today, a laptop is a reasonable buy, compared to a desktop.
Hope this helps!
My daughter was in college then and we bought her a laptop. It was heavy and clunky and we got it on this deal site. I think it was refurbished. She also had a cell phone, though it was also big and clunky and expensive.
I went to a 4-year private liberal arts college, graduating in 1998. We didn’t have laptops — we had mostly terminals until my junior or senior year*, when they got a bunch of Windows 95 boxes. I don’t think even the richer kids had laptops, and they were definitely not widespread.
*I studied abroad my whole junior year, and the changeover happened while I was off campus.
UNC Chapel Hill instituted student laptops around 2000-01, mandatory for incoming freshmen, optional for upper classes, and I’d say that they weren’t integrated into teaching for another couple years after that. (I started the PharmD program in fall 01, but I wasn’t required to get a laptop, since I was in a professional program as opposed to general college.)
Hi Eileen,
I was an older student attending a New Jersey University at that time . . . okay, Rutgers and I didn’t notice any laptops in the classroom at that time and I was in a hard science curriculum. About 2-3 years later they started popping up, but were still pretty rare in class.
Hope it helps.
Thanks, everybody, that’s great. It also gives me a more concrete idea of where the technology was at that point–big, clunky cell phones, etc. I do want my heroine to be working on a computer at her job, which I think is okay, but I’m going to have to review how much the average person could do in those days on a PC. Was going on the Internet to research something more difficult than it is today? Maybe a lot of things we do almost instantly today would still have been done “the old-fashioned way.” Not necessarily a bad thing, for plot purposes…
I attended a state university from 1992-1997 before taking a break. I had a PC in my dorm in 1993-1994 and had to connect via dialup modem through the phone line in my room. It was very, very, very slow.
The next year, I moved onto a computer interest floor. We were special and got the first Ethernet connections on campus. Very fast. Nice. One year, a bunch of us went in together and got some used Sun boxes, so we got to play with running our own Unix servers. And that’s what I started using instead of my desktop. To MUSH.
So laptops in the classroom in 1996-1997? Some students might bring them to some classes. I wouldn’t expect to see a lot of them in a single class, or to see one student bringing them into every class. And the classroom is less likely to also be wired. Let ALONE wireless.
Around about this time though, I think I heard of Hartwick College requiring students to pay an extra fee and the college would them give them a laptop. Mandatory laptop fee.
If you’re writing about a specific school, you might want to Email someone at the school who might know specifics re: laptops and Internet connection.
As for using the Internet for research? Not really! Pre-Google! Yahoo’s about a year or two old. If you wanted a transcript of 11001001, the TNG episode, sure, you could find that. More boring stuff? Probably not. Not easily.
Usenet, mailing lists, that sort of thing. No blogs. Not nearly as many websites. And those that existed didn’t necessarily have a lot of content.
If you were using the internet for academic work, it was probably on a usenet group or mailing list specific to your area of study.
As far as I can remember anyway! Back in the dark ages!
Yes, Julie, that takes me back to my waning days at one newspaper when it was just switching over to computers. We had a usernet for quite a few years that connected us with each other and with the editors, to e-mail them our stories, and that was about it. Toward the end of my stay there–I left in 1999–we “mature” reporters were just starting to do research on the Internet, and a lot of us hadn’t the foggiest idea how to go about it. I thought it was a bunch of hype because it took so long to weed out the links that were totally off the subject. I still preferred to just make a few phone calls!
After reading all the comments, I think I am an unusual case… But I graduated in ’00 from UMass Dartmouth (hardly an Ivy League, but definitely one of the leaders in computer engineering and computer science in the country – at least from ) and many classes – yes, even freshman year (’96) I had included at least one lap-top user writing notes. And I was an English major. Yes, they were kind of clunky, but they were definitely visible.
Also, most of us had computers in our rooms. (My husband was the unofficial go-to man when they all broke starting freshman year; that’s how we met, actually.) I was an RA beginning sophomore year (97) and walked the dorms 2-3 times a week. Very few students were without personal computers, and most of the personal computers were equipped with ethernet connections. We had to research online with either the Internet or the Intranet for almost every class. I was doing tours of classrooms on how to best use the Internet (and Intranet) for research; as a lead tutor in the Writing Center, I made up all of those handouts and the handbook in my junior year (’98-’99).
I wonder if it was _because_ I was at a state school that we had more computers; we were mostly funded by the state and grants. 75% or more students received some type of financial aid and/or work study. For those without computer access, we had computer labs all around the school that could provide access for up to half the population at once.
Anyway, the computers & computer education was the major draw for my husband to attend the school, he says… so, depending on what your character’s major is and where they went to school, it’s not entirely unbelievable to me. Of course, YMMV. 😉
My husband graduated in 1996 and we got married the same year. He attended Drew University – a small, private University (not quite Ivy League, mostly because they had no football team).
That said – as an incoming freshman in 1992, they were “given” a laptop (or they could opt for a desktop) as part of their books, etc. Expensive school, yes. But not the top of the line.