phoenixfalls (phoenixfalls) wrote in little_details,
phoenixfalls
phoenixfalls
little_details

Dorm Life at MIT in the 1980s?

I'm writing a story set at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set between 1983-1987. I've been filling it in with details from my own college experience, but that was in the early 2000s, so I've been trying to check which of the details I remember would still be accurate two decades earlier and which would be anachronistic. So far there are three items that were a staple of my experience that I haven't been able to confirm one way or another for the 1980s:

--Did college students have mini fridges in their rooms?
--Did college students have whiteboards on the outside of their doors, for people to leave notes on? If not, how would they have gone about leaving notes for each other?
--Did colleges stock the dorms with extra-long twin beds, requiring students to bring extra-long sheets?

I've gone through Wikipedia for each of these items and tried searching them all with "history of" and "1980s" with no luck.

ETA: A huge thank you to everybody who responded; I think these three questions have been answered sufficiently for my purposes! I also now have WAY more detail about MIT dorm culture, and quite a few new things to research so I can get the tech a bit more accurate than simple hand-waving. I absolutely still welcome any details that occur to you, particularly people who went to MIT/had friends at MIT or were involved with computer technology/research in the 80s! Feel free to keep commenting here or message me privately if that's easier.
Tags: 1980-1989, usa (misc), usa: education: higher education, ~technology (misc)
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