I remember when we got our first Ethernet setup in the common area on the ground floor of each of the dorms on the main campus at Columbia in 1977.  Prior to that the only network with printers attached you could send you word processor produced papers to for printing were up in the Computer Lab, brand new when I arrived in 1974 for my Freshman Year.  After my HS years working with a Brother electric typewriter which was a huge step up from the Royal manual typewriter I had in JHS, the Word Processor/Printer combo with the ability to correct your typos, change fonts, use bold and italics was like magic.  No more Whiteout, no more corrasable paper with smudges, no more carbon paper. It was amazing.  8)

Our dorm network had a primitive all-text messaging system, and the OP system did not yet have a Point-Click Graphical User Interface (GUI) and used the MS-DOS OP system Bill Gates made his initial fortune on before Windows, which was a direct ripoff of a XEROX GUI.  I had my very first email address, and our network was connected to other university networks via the Arpanet, before the World Wide Web.

It kept getting better through about the mid 1990s, when both Microsoft & Apple started going ballistic with Digital Copy Protection, and one by one all the free and open sources of information started getting locked up tighter than a 13 year old Catholic Virgin with a Kevlar Chastity Belt inside the Chapel of the NORAD command center underneath Cheyenne Mountain.  Rolling out around the same time was Google's all seeing, all knowing data collection and search cancer, metasticizing its tentacles through every aspect of people's lives, so marketers can know precisely how many squares of toilet paper you use every time you take a shit.

Once upon a time though, there was Computer Camelot.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ethernet-ieee-milestone

Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

The technology has become the standard LAN worldwide

RE