These historic computing labs teach kids what technology was like before phones, social media, and the cloud

In 2021, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee history professor Thomas Haigh began teaching a course on the history of computers.  

Haigh, the coauthor of a book on the subject published around that same timenoticed that many classic histories of computing from the 1990s assumed that readers would have firsthand knowledge of technology from around that era—desktop PCs and Macs, early game consoles, and the once-ubiquitous floppy disk. But for many of his students, that equipment was obsolete before they were born.