Being an Engineering student in the early 80's

bschoolwiz · April 15, 2013, 3:38pm

I am doing a project on what being an Engineering student in the early 80’s was like and I would like to hear some feedback and some stories.

The main goal of this project is to make young people more aware and more appreciative of technology.

I was born in 1977, so I was not in the college at that time but here are some of the things I remember:

<ul>
<li>Obviously, no Internet, no Blackboard, no email, so the only way to contact your professor was by phone or during class or office hours. </li>
</ul>

-Correct if I am wrong but phones in the early 80’s had no voicemail, so you had to call right when the person was available- If the person was on the phone with somebody else when you called, you would get a busy signal.

<ul>
<li>No way to check your grades online, so professors had a “grade book” where they recorded all your grades.</li>
<li>Obviously, no assignments, old tests or notes available online, so professors had to make photocopies of everything</li>
</ul>

-If I am not mistaken, students were allowed to smoke in the classroom? I know many professors smoked in the early 80’s while lecturing and it was absolutely accepted.

<ul>
<li>No way to apply to jobs electronically- so you had to stop by the place in person and fill out a job application by hand or mail a completed job application and your resume to the recruiter.</li>
<li>If you had to apply for a job out of state, you would have to request an application to be mailed to you, then you would fill out the job application by hand, attach your resume and mail it back to the recruiter.</li>
</ul>

-No texting or cellphones, so the only way to contact your parents would be by calling them from a public payphone or you would have to wait until you got to your apartment or dorm to make a call from a landline.

-Calls from one state to another were super expensive and often, you needed a phone card or a special phone plan, so there was no way to call from a state to another by simply dialing a number like we do today with our cellphones.

-No GPS- so if you had to find a street or an address, you would have to have a map in the glovebox of your car.

I could go on and on but these are some of the things that came to mind. Thanks!

ChrisTKD · April 15, 2013, 4:28pm

I didn’t stick with Engineering but if you are talking early 80s you can’t leave out:

<ol>
<li>All papers were prepared using manual typewriters and you were lucky if the typewriter incorporated correcto tape. Students that could type well had a nice side business typing up other students’ papers. You had to do your drafts and revisions using paper and pen because changing the typed version was a major undertaking.</li>
<li>We learned Fortran with punch cards.</li>
<li>Course requests were submitted on paper and I recall standing in long lines to request changes.</li>
<li>I don’t recall being allowed to use calculators as we had to memorize formulas.</li>
<li>There was a thing called a mailbox in the dorm and it was used for all sorts of communication with the university and externally. We wrote letters, i.e., not A, B, C but actual paragraphs describing things that had happened or what we planned on doing. We wrote out “by the way” instead of using acronyms that didn’t exist yet.</li>
<li>We played Pong. There were no on-line graphic RPGs - - we had to use our imagination for D&D and its variations.</li>
<li>We had to sign a contract with the local telephone company for a telephone to use in the room. The phone was mobile if you purchased a 25ft extension cord. We were not locked into a 2 year contract and we never had any dropped calls. You could buy an answering machine that used TAPE and record a message for when you were not at home.</li>
<li>I think copiers and faxes were relatively new technologies. Mimeograph had been phased out in the previous decade.</li>
<li>We had blackboards but they were black and you wrote on them with a white stick made of chaulk.</li>
</ol>

ucbalumnus · April 15, 2013, 5:33pm

Whole classes of CS students used terminals connected to a shared computer with 1/10,000 the compute speed and 1/1,000 the memory of an inexpensive computer that a college student today has in his/her dorm room.

Total cost of attendance was much lower, even after adjusting for inflation. It was much more realistic for someone to “work his/her way through college” at a low cost state university back then than now.

Magnetron · April 15, 2013, 5:57pm

I’ll try to address your points:

<ul>
<li>yes, you had to be able to talk to your professors face-to-face. Each department had secretaries who pretty much knew their schedules and when they would be in their offices. We stuck paper notes in their mailboxes if it were after hours or used intra-campus mail service.</li>
<li>Test results would be posted on the professor’s door or on the department bulletin board, lined up next to your student number/social security number (same thing). Usually, the professor would post the cumulative scores before finals.</li>
<li>Right, no voicemail, no call-waiting. Most people kept a dry-erase board on the dorm room door for messages. My freshman dorm had 2 payphones for roughly 180 kids, but about 2/3 opted for in-room phones. </li>
<li>Great big photocopiers (Xerox machines) were readily available. Things were obviously copies, though, with distortion and black spots. One of the selling points of fraternities was their test files. It was not unusual for professors to recycle old tests.</li>
<li>Nobody smoked in classrooms at RPI - not allowed. </li>
</ul>

-The job search was handled by mail and by phone. The Career Center kept notebooks filled with the names and addresses of hiring managers. We sent in a typed cover letter and a copy of the resume.

By the way, RPI had a mainframe computer with terminals spread around campus and a print center in the Computing Center. We all had student accounts (signon ID and password) that allowed access to the mainframe. The mainframe had different word processing programs. The print center was staffed 23 hours/day and you could hand them your resume paper and get high resolution copies made on good paper. Printouts could take as much as 4 hours when things got busy.

turbo93 · April 15, 2013, 6:38pm

Maybe we were different at the University of Louisiana, but:

<ol>
<li>Papers were typed in using nroff (line printers) with basic formatting commands and fixed font. Some people used typewriters but when I started in early '82 it was all nroff (runoff) i.e. .p begins a paragraph, .in 2 indents two spaces and so on. Printed on standard 11x17 (?) paper and had to use the dreaded paper cutter to cut to size. </li>
<li>Awesome interactive timesharing system - no cards. </li>
<li>Ditto. Easy way to abuse the paper based add/drop…</li>
<li>We could use calcs even the awesome ones but they were $$$ (HP-41CV)</li>
<li>N/A</li>
<li>We had an awesome MMORG text based of course that was routinely used to teach operating systems concepts. </li>
<li>We did it thru the school, same deal, very expensive. </li>
<li>We had awesome high speed copiers that worked much better than the stuff of today (faster and never jammed). Fax was there, low res tho.</li>
<li>Ditto</li>
</ol>

Assignments were picked up from a box outside the prof’s office or TA’s cubicle. Names and grades visible obviously. Old tests, usually that too. Grades posted by student ID otherwise.

Assignment and test libraries available at the local fraternities and foreign student association groups.

On our timesharing system we had file folders or common shared locations where materials were posted. A few profs even had their own online grading system :)

Magnetron · April 15, 2013, 6:45pm

More …

-Long distance calls were cheapest on Sundays, maybe 20 cents per minute. Most students talked to the folks once/week, usually Saturday or Sunday, at some pre-arranged time. Mine was Sunday evenings. And long distance might not be a “long distance;” local calling areas were usually only about 10 miles. Phone cards were maybe late 1980s. Sprint and MCI started offering competetive long distance in the early 1980s.

<ul>
<li>GPS was not common until about 10 years ago, maybe a topic for the 1990s thread.</li>
</ul>

ucbalumnus · April 15, 2013, 6:47pm

You’d think that faculty would catch on and not recycle old tests, and make the old tests publicly available (like this now: [Exams</a> | Department of Mathematics at University of California Berkeley](<a href=“http://math.berkeley.edu/courses/archives/exams]Exams”>Exams | Department of Mathematics) , though back then an arrangement would have to be made for students to look at or check out paper copies) to equalize access.

GLOBALTRAVELER · April 15, 2013, 6:57pm

I was a freshman in the Fall of 1984, so I do not know if I can comment. Does 1984 qualify as “early” 80’s??? On top of that, technically I was a pre-engineering major since at Michigan State, you are not a full engineering major until your junior year and acceptance to the engineering college…which did not happen, and I switched to Math/CS.

But if you need comments circa 1984+…let me know.

bschoolwiz · April 15, 2013, 8:21pm

Thank you so much for your responses! I was really hoping that some young people would join in or at least give us some feedback as to what they think about how far we have come since the early 80’s but maybe they can’t relate to what we are talking about.

I loved all the comments though!- regarding the HP 41 CV, that calculator came with a hard cover spiral bound 8.5 x 11 manual titled “Owner’s Handbook and Programming Guide” :)

And thanks GLOBALTRAVELER, if you want to add anything about your experience, I would appreciate it!

sacchi · April 15, 2013, 8:24pm

Don’t forget the 300 baud modems with acoustic couplers. Could be used to connect to bulletin boards, and the very limited University computer system.

Test grades would sometimes be posted on paper on the wall, by student number.

turbo93 · April 15, 2013, 8:43pm

The HP-41CV (or in my days, the TI-59, HP-67, Casio FX-502, Sharp Basic’s) was the derigeur gadget to have, along with the original Sony Walkman and proper music.

Computer centers were open 24/7 and there was a sub-culture of people who would be there permanently almost. We were always sought after by hapless undergrads who were trying to get their programs to work…

Certainly by 82 or 83 we had various forms of ‘net’ access - BITNET, UUCP, ARPAnet, CSNet, or some combination thereof. USENET by late '83 gave us access to the world (nothing like posting questions on the comp.unix boards and getting answers from the Deities at Bell Labs)…

By late 83 we had pretty decent Unix based systems (VAX’es generally running BSD 2.x or even 4.x), char based games like rogue or nethack (I had the university high score on both), etc.

PC’s first came on by probably '83 or early '84.

Tuition was beyond laughable back then. OOS $800/semester, instate $400. UT Austin was like $1k/semester OOS, LOL… Dorms were not THAT much cheaper, I was still paying around 2.5 grand asemester for room and board. Awful food regardless of school (University of New Orleans being a notable exception with awesome food).

Bicycles and cheap cars were the norm, lots more summer classes, etc etc.

Good old days!

Colorado_mom · April 15, 2013, 10:11pm

I was an upperclassman when the Clarkson freshman were required to purchase Zenith Z100 computers - [Zenith</a> Z-100 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenith_Z-100]Zenith”>Zenith Z-100 - Wikipedia) . Newsweek did an article lamenting that it would mean the “end of books” in college learning.

There were archaic word processors. No email. I had to type my master copy resume on an IBM Selectric typewriter - that took a lot of practice copies to get the spacing right.

simba9 · April 15, 2013, 10:26pm

I got my CS degree in 1983 from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

If you wanted to call your parents out-of-state, you called collect.

We had a big Honeywell time-sharing system, where everyone used terminals connected to the mainframe. You had to go to a computer lab to do your homework, and you got charged virtual money for each minute you were connected to the computer. As the semesters drew to a close and everyone was approaching their virtual money limit, all the engineering students would have to go to the computer center, or their professors, and beg for more virtual money to finish their projects/homework.

Some of the research projects had VAXes, and if you were allowed to use them, you’d puff your chest out and go around telling everyone you used a VAX.

When programming, they taught us to only use the last two digits of a year to save memory. (Thus, the year Y2K problem.)

We did most of our assignments in Pascal. C was the cutting edge language.

We received instruction in how to use slide rules.

No smoking in class.

It was after I graduated, but the first place I worked had about 25 programmers. We stored most of our programs on reels of tape, and had to ask a computer operator to load our programs onto the computers. Sometime around 1984 I think, we got a washing machine-sized, 5MB hard drive for the whole department. (Yes, 5 MB, not 5 GB.) People were going, “Wow, 5 meg. We’ll never fill that up.”

Tuition was $300/semester.

turbo93 · April 15, 2013, 10:54pm

Multics?

That was a very sinister plot to not let you wait till the last moment to do assignments… The answer was to sign up for the data center I/O room as a volunteer which gave a non-dollar limited account where you could be recompiling the whole OS 24/7 :)

bschoolwiz · April 15, 2013, 11:15pm

OMG, you guys are great! Regarding USENET, I can’t even describe how cool those newsgroups were.

For people who love computers and technology, you can find a lot of USENET archives online with a lot of historical stuff, this is the first time smileys were mentioned, it is a message dated November 10, 1982 coming from Professor James Morris -Arpanet host at Carnegie Melon, cool stuff!

Mail-from: Arpanet host CMU-10A rcvd at 10-NOV-82 0826-PST
Date: 10 November 1982 1126-EST (Wednesday)
From: James.Morris at CMU-10A
To: csl^ at PARC-MAXC, isl^ at PARC-MAXC, junk^ at PARC-MAXC
Subject: Communications Breakthrough
Message-Id: <10Nov82 112614 JM90@CMU-10A>

<pre><code>Because you can’t see the person who is sending you electronic
mail you are sometimes uncertain whether they are serious or
joking. Recently, Scott Fahlman at CMU devised a scheme for
annotating one’s messages to overcome this problem. If you turn
your head sideways to look at the three characters they look
sort of like a smiling face. Thus, if someone sends you a
message that says “Have you stopped beating your wife?:-)” you
know they are joking. If they say “I need to talk to you :-(”,
be prepared for trouble.

Since Scott’s original proposal, many further symbols have bee
proposed here:

( for messages dealing with bicycle helmets
@= for messages dealing with nuclear war
<:-) for dumb questions
oo for somebody’s head-lights are on messages
o>-<|= for messages of interest to women
~= a candle, to annotate flaming messages

So you see, bit-map displays are really quite unnecessary :->
</code></pre>

SansSerif · April 15, 2013, 11:16pm

I went to college from 78 to 82. I was the envy of my floor because I had an electric (not manual) typewriter. People offered to buy new ribbons and bottles of whiteout if they could borrow it. (there’s a lost skill - changing a typewriter ribbon!)

I remember calling my parents once a week, always on the weekend when it was cheaper. I actually wrote letters to my brothers. PacMan, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong were huge.

And tuition, room and board for a year at Penn State in 78 was $2500. At GW it was $5000, Syracuse was $7000.

simba9 · April 15, 2013, 11:18pm

“Multics?”

I vaguely recall it being some version of GCOS. I don’t remember even hearing of Multics until long after I graduated.

“That was a very sinister plot to not let you wait till the last moment to do assignments”

The sinister plot didn’t work very well. As is probably still the case today, we never started our CS homework or projects until 12 hours before they were due.

turbo93 · April 15, 2013, 11:23pm

GCOS? I bow to your reference of a system even more arcane than Multics :)

I actually started my assignments the day they were given, finished them early, and then had time to hang around the computer center and impress the newbies :).

coolweather · April 15, 2013, 11:24pm

<ol>
<li>Using nroff and troff cost money too. I had to pay extra money to the computer center to use the service with laser printer output to write my resume.</li>
<li>Not many people had typewriter. I used coin-operated typewriters in the library. It’s expensive too.</li>
<li>I had VAX/VMS and Unix emails at my campus and my part-time job.</li>
<li>No text message. Only motd (message of the day when you log on the computer)</li>
<li>No graphics picture. You print out your SPICE (circuit design software) graphs as character graphs on line printers.</li>
</ol>

simba9 · April 15, 2013, 11:33pm

“I actually started my assignments the day they were given, finished them early, and then had time to hang around the computer center and impress the newbies”

We had students like that. I wasn’t one of them. They always got A’s on their assignments, and the rest of us hated them like you couldn’t believe. :-)

Being an Engineering student in the early 80's

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