There wasn’t a lot of benefit in having a laptop until wifi became ubiquitous in lecture halls, libraries and cafes.

Probably around 2010 was when you could expect to find reliable wifi on most college campuses.

I can't really say, but I graduated in 2007 and it was still unusual to see someone taking notes (even in tech classes) using a laptop. Maybe that will help.

I was in college at the time working at the university student computing labs. It was the iBook in 1999 and the few years thereafter. Up until then average students kept their computers in their dorm or just used the campus labs. All of the sudden laptops were seen as something other than 90s briefcases. The computer labs started to empty and all of the sudden profs were mentioning laptop policies in syllabi.

I started college in 2007, and I only had a laptop.

When I left for college in 1997 I had a a laptop, but other than taking up less room in the car, it was a desktop. A 486slc/33 with, I want to say, 4mb of ram and a 200mb hard drive. If ran Dos 6.22 and Win 3.1.

I was over the moon to get the all clear to replace it with a K6/200 tower with 32mb of ram and a 2.1 gb hard drive. Freaking GIGABYTES man!

By the time I started law school five years later I needed a laptop (a lilac colored magnesium P3 Sony that was a bit long in the tooth when I got it from some overstock site but was built like a brick shithouse). It ran Win ME, which was less miserable than you may have heard, but was indeed pointless and buggy. WiFi was a brand new addition to most of the campus, and we all had various antennas sticking out of our PC cards slots.

I would say late 2000s

2005 was when I saw a big push towards laptops.

I graduated 2006 and my college has WiFi all over so early-2000s?

Daughter was given a laptop at admission to the Air Force Academy in 1996, but I was envious... Didn't get my first laptop until about three years later.

~2003