<p>1) My dorm had sit-down meals for lunch and dinner, with college boys serving as waiters.
2) We registered in the basketball arena. We stayed in the arena seating until it was our turn to troop around the concourse, going to different tables and praying we would get the classes we needed.
3) We had to go to the Computation Center to turn in our sets of computer cards and wait for them to be processed. More praying - that we wouldn’t have made any dumb errors and have to get the cards rerun!
4) We had to take a manual drafting class and draw everything by hand.
5) We knew what a sliderule was. Our calculators were big and bulky and cost hundreds of dollars.
6) Diet Coke was introduced when we were in college.
7) There were no treadmills or other excercise equipment in our dorm (now there’s an entire fitness studio!).
8) Tuition was $4 per credit hour, plus about $200 in fees.</p>
<p>Interesting how many people are posting about parietals. I’m wondering if this is because you are a little older than me, or if it’s a regional thing. There were definitely no restrictions whatsoever on male-female interaction on our campus in upstate NY in the late 70s. Some dorms were coed, some same-sex, but everybody came and went as they pleased regardless.</p>
<p>Roommate spent more on sorority dues than tuition (tuition was $251/quarter).</p>
<p>Water bottles?!?</p>
<p>Put myself through college with Pell grants, campus job (dining hall and RA for two years each), and didn’t have to borrow until junior year.</p>
<p>Listened to music using my record player (which sat on top of milk crates and boards).</p>
<p>Manual typewriter.</p>
<p>First time I used a computer was in a 300-level journalism class. It used 11 inch floppies.</p>
<h1>1 reason I feel ancient on CC – current college applicants were born after the end of the Cold War.</h1>
<p>Wrote lots of letters to my boyfriend. (Still have them.)</p>
<p>nightchef, my all-girls, private dorm advertised itself as being very strict. My roommate’s parents signed her up for the EXTRA strict rules. She was supposed to sign herself out and in whenever she left at night. She avoided the problem by just staying OUT all the time - at her boyfriend’s apartment. I was always worried I’d have to lie to her parents if they called, but they never did. We were not allowed to have boys on the halls except for one Sunday afternoon a semester!</p>
<p>Tuition was $4/hour. My dad could write a check for less than $1000 and cover the year. It was cheaper than my high school.</p>
<p>Registration was in the gym and involved going to tables by subject and exchanging cards if you had time conflicts. </p>
<p>You took the SAT once.</p>
<p>We didn’t have AP classes.</p>
<p>As a journalism major, I was lucky because I could use the VDTs for term papers. Otherwise it was the IBM selectric.</p>
<p>
Me too, though I don’t remember the results being on a printout. We snuck onto the arpanet because the game was on the MIT computers not ours.</p>
<p>I was such a lousy typist that my roommate and my boyfriend typed most of my senior thesis.</p>
<p>The most amazing thing to me now is not that I only applied to 3 colleges, but that U Penn was my safety!</p>
<p>Probably a little later than the average (late 80s, earliest 90s):</p>
<ol>
<li><p>We lugged around these weird hybrids of typewriter/word processor. It was like an electric typewriter with a flip-up four-line LCD screen and a floppy disk drive in the side.</p></li>
<li><p>Phone registration system was so swamped that you would often get a busy signal for hours straight. Only one or two kids in the dorm had phones with automatic redial - people would pay to use their phone for registration. Rumor was that off-campus calls got through easier, so one semester we walked over to the bus station with our laundry quarters and registered using the banks of pay phones.</p></li>
<li><p>I lived for an entire school year on $7,000 (including tuition).</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Oh man, I feel young compared to some of you. </p>
<p>1) We did not have the internet, but we did have email (you had to know how to route it though).</p>
<p>2) I spoke to my mother pretty much every day. I never bought a single stamp during college.</p>
<p>3) We were poor, but my boyfriend actually had his own computer.</p>
<p>4) I applied to several schools (I think it was 6).</p>
<p>5) There was no way on this earth that I could make enough money in a summer job to pay for tuition (even after generous financial aid).</p>
<p>High School:</p>
<p>Took the SATs twice because the rumor was that if you took them more than twice colleges subtracted 50 points from your score.</p>
<p>Achievement Tests not SAT IIs</p>
<p>What are APs or IB - never heard of them in HS</p>
<p>Took the ACT because ASU required it. Nobody at my HS had ever heard of the ACT.</p>
<p>Applied to six colleges. Three safeties, match and two reaches. Never heard from one safety.</p>
<p>College:</p>
<p>All male. No women in the dorms except on move-in day when female relatives were allowed in. Fraternity House - No women allowed upstairs. Drove at least one hour roundtrip for dates, who if they stayed overnight, stayed in “approved housing”.</p>
<p>Saturday morning classes. Miss three classes and you fail the class. (By October had a big, brass, loud alarm clock.) Wore a tie to class. All teachers were full professors, no TAs, TFs, or adjunct professors. All these rules changed the year after they affected me.</p>
<p>School was extremely diverse. There were two Asian students and two Black students in my class alone. The school was about evenly divided North and South, but no West (except for Texas). We had both Northern and Southern Preppies (identifiable by dress).</p>
<p>My laptop was an electric typewriter that only weighed about fifteen pounds. I discovered erasable paper (Corrasable Bond?) early on. Music was provided by a portable (less than eight pounds) AM/FM radio/tape player (not stereo).</p>
<p>Wrote letters home often (weekly?) and loved receiving them. Senior year dated a girl who was going to college only 500 miles away (about an eight hour drive). Tried to write more often then. Telephone calls were very limited. I don’t even remember if there was a telephone on my dorm floor. Fraternity house had one telephone (pay) for long-distance calls which was heavily used Sunday night. One friend had a telephone charge card. We were all envious.</p>
<p>Lastly, tuition went up every year. $50 each year.</p>
<ol>
<li> Was accepted to state flagship on the basis of GPA, without SAT scores.</li>
<li> All my electric appliances could be served on one outlet. Power strip – what’s that?</li>
<li> The dorm had separate floors/wings/elevators for men and women – the only “common area” was the first floor.</li>
<li> Sororities had sign-out cards. Curfew was midnight Sun-Thurs, 2 am Fri and Sat. Dinners were served by male students, usually from the fraternities on campus - I believe they were referred to as “hashers”.</li>
<li> It was rare to see a student wearing jeans to class.</li>
</ol>
<p>Dorm rooms had phones in them. And they were rotary dial…</p>
<p>No ATMs. You had to remember to go to the bank to get cash for the weekend. Not that I spent much…movies were $1 at the Student Union.</p>
<p>I love this thread, but now I’m feeling really old.</p>
<p>I got the electric typewriter for graduation, not a laptop like my son is getting.</p>
<p>Room, board, tuition and fees at BU were around $5,000, not $50,000.</p>
<p>We went disco dancing.</p>
<p>You could always get last minute seats in the bleachers for any Red Sox game.</p>
<p>Bovertine: “I was enthralled by the “Pong” video game.”</p>
<p>To this day when my kids complain about the “horrible” graphics on one of the bazillion electronic devices they own I reply “we had a line and a dot, baby”. And we played it for hours on end.</p>
<p>1) I typed papers for students on my brand-new IBM selectric (HS graduation present!) to make my spending money. My roommate hated to type, so she did all my laundry and I did her all her typing. She was an engineering major and only had one paper a semester - I certainly felt like I got the better deal!</p>
<p>2) I remembering lining up in the gym with long lines to register. If there was space in a class, you received a keypunch card. I actually learned keypunching during a summer job and was so excited I could put it on my resume. By the time I graduated it was already obsolete.</p>
<p>goaliedad writes:</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>You’re younger than I am or you went to a classier place. At W&M in the late 70s, there were no individual phones in <em>any</em> of the dorms.</p>
<p>We had one shared black rotary dial phone for the whole floor (or wing in the largest dorms). The phone would only make and receive <em>local</em> calls. To call home, you used the payphone. If the dorm was small, there was one payphone for the whole dorm to share. And if your parents needed to call you—they called the payphone!</p>
<p>Thanks for the trip down memory lane - and for making feel old. I remember typing on the electric typewriter, keypunched computer cards - hundreds of them and awful food. I went to a SUNY and I believe that tuition was $750 a semester and room and board was also $750! I called my parents every Sunday because it was cheaper and only spoke to them once a week. Oh - and since the legal drinking age is 18 we didn’t have to sneak beer and alcohol - and we didn’t have the binge-drinking and alcohol poisoning issues that college students have now that the legal drinking age is 21, but that topic is for another thread!!</p>
<ol>
<li><p>We knew there was an Ivy League, but it was way back east, and folks that wanted to go there could just go to Stanford instead.</p></li>
<li><p>After college: Peace Corps, unless you had a high number.</p></li>
<li><p>They distributed financial aid by giving you checks at the start of each quarter.</p></li>
<li><p>The Claremont Colleges (and Cal Poly SLO) were examples of regional - not national - excellence.</p></li>
<li><p>Davis and UCSC had the the highest graduate school acceptance rates in the UC system.</p></li>
<li><p>There were open fields between UCI and Newport.</p></li>
<li><p>$19 tickets between LA and SF . . . on the airplane.</p></li>
<li><p>Off campus rent: house for $180 a month . . . a few blocks from the beach.</p></li>
<li><p>Ya just took your SATs and saw what ya got.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>10 . Hardest UC to get into was NOT Cal Berkeley or UCLA.</p>
<p>Three of us undergrads and the guy with long hair who ran the system were the only ones who knew one could use the campus mainframe (through the couple of terminals in the computer room in the basement of the science building) to do word processing. We were the only three students who turned in papers with margins both left and right justified. We thought it looked so cool - as if it were from a newspaper or a magazine! </p>
<p>The professors looked at our papers with some suspicion: “How did you do that?”</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Applied to 3 schools and didn’t pay a cent in application fees. (no feees at Ga Tech & MD [my state school] for NM commended, plus a service academy).</p></li>
<li><p>Freshman comp sci class was all about progamming in Fortran. (we were first class NOT to use punchcards!). </p></li>
<li><p>My college was part of DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing System), which I often used for chat boards.</p></li>
<li><p>NM cut-off scores were calculated by doubling verbal & adding math. (which screwed me, as my math score was 15 point higher than verbal). </p></li>
<li><p>My husband was one of few people I knew who took AP exams. Most HS didn’t offer AP classes.</p></li>
</ol>