[qludes]

Yeah, you're right. I'm off by a few years. Early 2000s was when these Sharp personal assistants came out. And some students would have been exposed to Windows 98 or XP and sometimes IRC or ICQ but on average they didn't have any actual computing experience apart from maybe playing games or chatting.

That was a bit before my time so they would have had to cope with actual UNIX-like CDE on Solaris until they figured out how to access the nicer Linux servers that had KDE. But in these days thin clients with 24" screens were actually pretty nice compared to what students actually owned. Even on Solaris with Mozilla and CDE.

The actual teaching material didn't change that much though because the university essentially taught the same sh course with here's latex, here's man, here's how you install whatever you need to ~/bin since the late 1980ies. It didn't matter if a professer wanted to use C++ or Modula2 or Pascal or Java because every student got that crash course in how to actually use the faculty provided computung pools.

First semester homework and midterm tests ensured that they were able to start their IDE or interpreter and knew how to compile their homework on the right architecture, how to search for documentation and how to actually use a keyboard to submit their math homework. The beauty of that approach was that it allowed the 10% or so who were really interested in learning more access to university resources while also ensuring that no math-cs double major graduates without at least a modest grasp of tools that were state of the art in Knuth's days.