[letitbeirie]

I feel like this could have only happened to people in this very specific age range:

In 1995, when I was a freshman in high school, they trotted my English class down to the library for a lesson on how to use "the information superhighway." For the next hour or so, the librarian dispensed wisdom to us about how to open Netscape, type URLs into the address bar, and that kind of thing.

Put another way, they had a woman who did not know how to use the Internet try to teach a few dozen teenagers who did know how to use the Internet how to do something they did understand by reading them a book that she did not.

I didn't learn anything about the Internet that day but I feel like I gained an appreciation for Kafka, even if I didn't know it at the time.

[chrisco255]

Well if it makes you feel any better we spent a whole week on the Dewey Decimal system and how to look up books via index cards. Because computerized indexes and search were rapidly replacing physical lookup, I never ever used that skill again.

[bradknowles]

I worked in the library on campus from 1985 to 1989. We had both the Old Stacks (where Dewey Decimal was used) and the New Stacks (with Library of Congress). We also had some pretty serious computer systems in the basement to connect our systems up to all the other University libraries in the country and world. And we had computer terminals for checking the books out and back in.

[dweekly]

I took a programming class at my high school in 1994. I was a sophomore and had been programming for a decade, including several internships. It was the first time the school had ever offered a computer class and on the first day the teacher started copying down code onto the whiteboard and as she did I and several other punks in the class started pointing out errors in her logic and syntax. At the end of the first day the school administration decided to make it a "study on your own" class. I learned a lot, mostly by heading out to the local bookstore and going through a few tomes.

[fma]

Congrats? My freshman year was 1997 - and I know when I was in middle school in 1995 majority of my peers knew nothing about computers, didn't have a computer, let alone the Internet. I was a fortunate one to receive a 2nd hand computer and at that time I using Lynx (text based browser) to browse the web because I was using my local library's system as my ISP and connecting via Telix.

Rather than look down on your librarian for introducing a novel concept to students, I think she should be applauded for trying.

Everyone started somewhere.

[tantalor]

I'm sure some of your 1995 classmates did not have personal computers with internet access. Or know anything about the internet outside of AOL.