At my second college we had phones in our rooms. Our phone number was one digit different than a very popular pizza place. We often took orders ??
I vividly remember getting my first Mac while in college and having to do the floppy disk shuffle to get my stats program to run for my undergrad research. D laughs at our lack of tech stories.
Phone service over the decades. Party lines when a kid. Dad always asked for “time and charges” when calling relatives. Early 1970’s I lived in a dorm but from a suburb- no charge weekly calls on the dorm phone (only charged for long distance calls). Son’s dorm room came with a phone but he used his cell phone. Now they no longer have phones in the rooms. H’s Indian parents couldn’t get their own phone service for many years- 3 am phone calls our time because they used a business open during daytime hours to make the calls. Now relatives can do free video cell phone calls.
I had a nonelectric typewriter for papers- couldn’t afford the fancy spellcheck electric one. A rich friend had a $100 calculator that didn’t do that much. Son took his desktop computer plus monitor. Now it would be just a laptop. Even our top ten chemistry dept only had one Wang calculator in one of the labs. We used slide rules for all but one pchem lab result- for that we had to punch perhaps 9 digits in a punchcard to be run through a computer (took me a few tries- never like typing and was bad at hitting the right numbers). That friend had a reel to reel tape player as well. I got a stereo with an 8 track player for a college age birthday.
There were no ATM’s yet when I was a resident. It was a juggling act to deposit my paycheck during the bank’s hours and pay my rent on time. In college I cashed checks at the dorm store- $20 would last a long time. We had cardboard meal tickets that were run through the cash register (I was a student worker at one time)- each of 3 meal plans got you different numbers and there was an active buying/selling at the end of a semester since they were cheaper than using cash. We put money in son’s student ID cars for such stuff. We bought little plastic rectangles to use in the pay washers (free dryers), he used his school ID card.
Some things never change. Still not a car campus. Class times still have smae oddball starts- 50 minute classes with 15 minutes to get between them. Still can rememebr those so many decades later. Now they have many more 1 1/2 hour classes twice a week instead of only 1 hour 3 times a week options. Plus so much data online you don’t always need to show up. We had to pick up registration forms at one end of campus, visit every department and register, then return the form at the other end of a large campus- traversing many hills in January. They no longer publish a Timetable and easy on the computer registration from anywhere.
Coed housing- students on different floors in the same dorm started my second year. Son’s year the only all women dorm finally became coed (a nice location). They locked the women’s dorms at night in my day, now they’re all locked all of the time.
A dynamic campus. Every few years a new building goes up, something old removed or an addition added. Interesting how that 1913 (reomdeled) dorm is still in use, along with those from the 1920’s and 1940. Even the dorms of my era have been remodeled- no more built in everything with bolsters so the bed could be a couch. No lofting back then. No provided microwave refrigerators in every room. Forbidden to remove trays from dining places (dinner and snack bars)- but it was always someone’s job to collect trays from a nearby hill winters.
Campus culture included a high rise for grad students, now so many live “off campus” (often closer tha a dorm to class) after freshman or sophomore year- in buildings built long after my time when the student slums in old houses a longer walking distance existed.
I was 3 hours away from home. I don’t think my parents ever came to visit - just drop off and pick up time. I did go home maybe once a semester besides breaks.
How about scheduling? The course offerings were printed in a catalog type bound book - you had to show up in person and register for each class. I can remember walking into like a huge gym with what seemed like thousands of people (actually maybe a couple hundred) people to schedule.
I had a phone in my dorm room. The usual practice was to disconnect it in May and pay to get it reconnected in September. One year, the girl moving in for the summer asked if she could just keep using the phone and she would pay me back for the bills.
Well, her friend decided to make a bunch of long distance calls so the bills were quite large. The friend didn’t pay back the girl in my room, so she said she couldn’t pay me! I was so ripped. She wouldn’t budge. I told my parents, and somehow they got the contact information for her parents in Houston. One phone call and the bill got paid!
Flash forward three years and my future husband and I took a month-long class to get certified as scuba divers for our honeymoon. That girl was in our class! Talk about awkward. She was pretty rude. 
I had a Brother typewriter and liquid paper was my friend…lol.
I also remember registering for classes on paper and lining up for hours to get my schedule.
I know my mom had us kids believing she was practically a Straight A student in college. If you want your kids to continue believing that, it helps to not keep a copy of your final transcript in your belongings. 
It doesn’t change one iota about how I feel about her. I just find it interesting how her brain probably convinced her that she did better than she actually did - or maybe she knew it all along and just wanted to motivate those of us behind her. Who knows? She did finish in the top fifth of her class or thereabouts.
Hall phone here. Some kids paid for one in their room, but I was a poor scholarship kid so, no. Used library typewriter to write(or rather, complete, as I wrote them by hand) papers.
Class registration? Nightmares still.
I’m from MD but went to college in the South Bronx. In May prior to freshman year, there was a reception hosted by alumni for DC area incoming students. There were only about 10 of us from the area so it wasn’t a big gathering. The father of one girl kept asking these ridiculous questions about safety on and off campus (obviously a concern for parents but his questions were over the top). I was trying hard not to roll my eyes as he was monopolizing the converasation.
We were randomly assigned roommates back then and were not told ahead of time who we were living with. Of course you know where this is going…guess who my roommate was? Yep, that girl with the overprotective father. Despite the fact that I was disappointed not to be placed with someone other than one of the few kids from MD/DC, we became fast friends and lived together every year.
At the end of my freshman year during finals, I got really sick over the weekend when our campus clinic was closed. My RA found someone to drive me to a nearby emergency room where I ended up getting admitted overnight. Of course my parents had no idea what was going on - I handled it all by myself (and woke up to someone trying to steal my wallet from a drawer next to my bed. Needless to say, I slept with it under my gown the rest of the night!). I didn’t want to worry them, plus it was too hard trying to make a phone call back then as all we had were pay phones down the hall. I called them when I was released the next morning.
Corona typewriter
old bell black phone
calculator
white out
onion skin paper
course catalogs
long lines everywhere
great dorm conversations and EVERYONE helping each other out.
Smokers getting into arguments because they didn’t like living with other smokers!
I graduated in 1998 so I had an old computer and a phone in the room…but dh went abroad to the phone in the hallway. I would meet him in old-school chat when I walked across campus on the computer and several days he wasn’t there. I tracked him down in a hospital-he had broken his leg and had surgery! It was crazy, and they actually confirmed he was there and transferred me to him!
I thought it was pretty fun to start registration in some big barn or pavilion on the ag side of campus and then go to each department to sign up for classes. If there was a course that had already filled up, you might have to make extra trips to create a new unexpected schedule.
My dad bought me a nice electric typewriter that lasted all four years before word processing became a thing.
No one had TVs in their dorm room.
We called home collect and told the operator to ask for someone who didn’t exist, but this name agreed upon in advance was a signal to our parents that we were awaiting their call. And definitely we paid attention to the time of day when calls were cheaper.
By 1991, we had phones in our room. We had to enter our student ID a/k/a our social security number to access long distance.
I had a word processor that showed around four lines of text on a screen. I typed papers for cash for friends who had nothing. We did have computer labs, but they were so foreign to most of us.
Registration was done by telephone through an automated system - we had a paper course catalog and you would enter the code for each course and the system would let you know whether the section course was open/closed.
We got our grades at the end of the semester via a similar telephone automated system.
The state where I went to school changed its drinking age to 21 right before my freshmen year. Those that had met the previos drinking age were “grandfathered” and could still indulge legally. The freshmen dorm was therefore “dry” and the upperclassman dorms were not. The freshmen dorm was also over capacity so scholarship freshmen were put in the upperclassman dorms. I guess they thought we were self-disciplined enough not to drink so surrounding us with legal drinkers was okay? It was awful.
Electric typewriter and computer lab hours were used to type papers. I had a professor that actually took off points if you used a typewriter and had to make any corrections! I think there were only 30-40 computers for the entire campus to share.
Course registration! How could I forget. It was a lottery to get a number to register and then there was course exchange if you didn’t get the right schedule or had a conflict. My H said it was like being on the floor of the NYSE - people yelling out course and lab times that they needed so you go with someone else and evenly switch classes ; )
I also remember sleeping out under the football bleachers to queue for hockey tickets.
My first roommate and I shared a phone line.
I understood what long-distance calls cost, and I only had $75 a month of allowance money for personal expenses, so I only talked to my parents if they called me, and I only called my boyfriend (who went to college in another state) once a week, at night after the rates went down. He called me once a week on a different night. And we carefully limited the length of our calls.
My roommate was a very confident, sophisticated person who seemed to know what she was doing (and who frequently made the point that I was an idiot), so it didn’t occur to me that there might be a problem in the fact that she was on the phone a lot. I assumed she was talking with friends on campus – after all, nobody in their right mind would spend that much on long distance, would they?
When the first phone bill came in, I owed about $15, which was about what I had expected. She owed $300 – and it turned out that she had just about the same amount of spending money each money as I did.
I was able to hold off the laughter until I got to the bathroom.
We had a phone. But no money. We used to call home collect and it was a recorded name. Lots of collect calls from “I’m ok” and “I’ll be home Friday”.
I think we used a Wang word processor. It was so high tech, it felt like cheating. lol.
“money each month” Sorry.
When I did my masters thesis…all the data had to be entered on…keypunch cards…remember those? I worried I was going to drop the box!
I collected a whole set of Looney Toon cartoon glasses by eating at Hardee’s every week. I wish I still had them!
Yes to standing in line for tickets to things. I once slept on line to get tickets for a folks festival because I was an RA and could get an unlimited numbered them. My friends took turns bringing me food, and staying with me. It was fun!
Hari Krishna anyone?
I went to college in the 70s. The only way to get cash on campus was to go to the bursar’s office and cash a check. Every Friday I’d cash a check for $15 and that would carry me through the week.
My college started admitting women a year or two before I got there. The school had converted one dorm for the women. Someone on the renovation committee decided that the women would want/need a bathtub. One of the bathrooms had a tub. I don’t think it was ever used.