Being an Engineering student in the early 80's

College Majors Engineering Majors
41

<p>This is like hearing about life before running water and refrigeration.</p>

<p>I whine when my 19" monitor can’t display all my emacs windows without overlap, so I have to use the mouse to select.</p>

<p>Btw, I’m currently doing a class lab involving programming a microcontroller–in BASIC.</p>

42

<p>“before running water and refrigeration” = TRS-80 assembly language project for a grad EE class on microcontrollers. I wrote a fairly simple but decent full screen editor for it, that could save to disk, read from disk, etc. Did another one (a robot control arm) in FORTH.</p>

43

<p>All my monitors were DEC terminals, VT-52, and VT-100 terminals (except the Sun-2). Only 80 characters per row and 25 lines per screen.</p>

<p>I did not have unlimited terminal connections (except at my part-time job). When the class was crowded the system terminated the session in 2-3 hours. I had to go to look for an available terminal or re-sign up for terminal time.</p>

44

<p>For microprocessor project I used ICE-86, Intel 16 bit processor.</p>

45

<p>FORTH - I used it on my first job. It’s pretty cool. I had multitasking capability, cool graphics library and beat the dumb MS DOS/C compiler. The only downside was sometimes I had to wait for a week to know whether I had stack underflown or overflown.</p>