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Completely disagree, but if you haven't been around for at least a couple of sets of twenty years I can see why you would think this.
Someone else gave a great set of things that were different, but really, twenty years ago was almost completely different in nearly every dimension of life I can remember.
In 2003 not only was gay marriage not legal, gay sex and relationships were illegal where I live, and was punishable by prison time.
In 2003 most of the country wasn't online, pagers were more common than cell phones, and 3DFX VooDoo graphics cards were still a thing.
In 2003 I used to smoke inside my community college's cafeteria, where people ate because it was the designated smoking area.
In 2003 minimum wage was $5.15 nationwide, and gas was just a little over a dollar.
In 2003 people didn't use laptops in school and electronics were confiscated on site, sometimes teachers would 'lose' them and you never got it back, and somehow that was an expected outcome - I lost a laser pointer that way.
In 2003 casual homophobia was mainstream, all your friends, and probably you would be making gay jokes, and transphobia was not a concept. I thought transgender people were the same thing as intersex, I didn't know gender transition was possible.
American society was post 9/11 and highly patriotic, even liberal people were unusually patriotic, and politics were probably the most 'neutral' that I've ever seen, it was nothing like they are now, but in general things trended towards cultural conservatism.
I remember being an outcast because I didn't believe in God, and people would casually tell me I was going to go to Hell.
Nah, 20 years is an entirely different cultural paradigm.
23 years ago offices buildings were not locked. No doors were locked. Zero. You didn't need a badge to be in the building. Now in most places you swipe through every single door and you need a badge on a lanyard.
Voodoo cards were largely irrelevant to new buyers by 2001. The Vodoo 5 line was launched in 2000 and wasn't a terrible value, but then Nvidia launched the GeForce 3 in early 2001 and ate their lunch. 3dfx went defunct in 2002 and their assets were bought up by Nvidia.
But your point is completely valid, culture moves slow even when business and technology don't.
I really do mean culture independent of technology though, the entire range of acceptable opinions now versus then is completely unrecognizable, and in many ways my entire thought process and range of ideas are foreign to then as well.
I don't know how old you are but I lived through a completely different experience than you...
I'd been selling and repairing computers for 6+ years by 2003 and had been in the workforce many years before that. I can assure you people were definitely using laptops in schools (as I sold them to them)... Maybe not as ubiquitously as they do now but it was already quite common.
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on how much things have changed since then ... Now, if you want to go back 30 or 40 years then I can definitely agree we've seen some significant changes.
Hell, the first time I flew out of the country I didn't even need photo ID much less a passport.
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.
In case it still doesn't occur to you, I pointed out that I'd been in the computer business for a number of years already by then to illustrate that I'd already been selling laptops for years to people who intended to use them in school prior to 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
WiFi is in no way necessary to take notes, write papers, etcetera.
College is certainly included in the definition of "school" so that seems a silly separation to try and make.
Cell phones and smart phones in particular are irrelevant to anything I said.
Do you have a point or are you just trying to disagree with me?
My point is that my experience in my life, to now, across two decades, was drastically different. People still didn't bring a laptop to the community college I went to that year either, I had never seen or heard of it as a practice until later.
I returned back to school about five years later and laptops in classes was common.
We somehow seem to have had drastically different experiences she perspectives from a broadly large geographic region.
For additional perspective my typing class in 1999 used an actual typewriter, not a computer, so socioeconomic factors of my own high school experience and the area I grew up may have actually been that different and potentially atypical to even surrounding areas, it's hard to tell.
That could certainly explain some things seemingly drastically different over that 20 year period for you I suppose then.
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.
Dude... I wasn't rich and it most certainly wasn't "only rich people" that had internet at home.
Hell, I personally had both cable and DSL in my house from 2000-2003 so my wife downloading wouldn't cause latency issues with my gaming.
I also lived in the southeastern US at the time.
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.