<p>~ 1970 -</p>
<p>Smoking was allowed in the classroom. I used to grab a bottled coke from the vending machine on my way into class and use the empty bottle for an ashtray when I was done. </p>
<p>We went barefoot to class in the spring.</p>
<p>Typing term papers was the most miserable task in the world without a bottle of correction fluid nearby.</p>
<p>My full-time tuition was under $1000 per semester.</p>
<p>There was a brand-new ATM on campus! It dispensed $5 bills.</p>
<p>If you had a typewriter of your own, you were probably rich. Most of us paid by the hour to use the typewriters in the library.</p>
<p>We used a card catalog to look up books for our research projects.</p>
<p>To communicate with someone who wasn’t next to us, we walked to common locations and stood in line waiting to use a payphone. When the price went up to a quarter per call, we were all outraged and the really savvy students figured out how to use the phones in the computing sites to dial off campus.</p>
<p>To register for classes, I flipped through a published paper schedule and wrote down all the sections of all the classes I wanted – then went to a “registrar’s site” and crossed off all the full classes from the daily printout in the window, then filled out about a dozen paper drop/add forms with possible alternate schedules from my list in the hope that one or more of each class I wanted would still be open by the time I got to the front of the line.</p>
<p>When our CS projects were done at 3am, we used the terminals to Bitnet with students in Sweden.</p>
<p>But the number one reason I feel ancient now is that in my senior-year Computer Graphics class, the prof told us about this fantastic cutting-edge graphical work that was being done at BYU and even based some of our projects on it. It was called “windows.”</p>
<p>Our high school had a smoking lounge for the seniors.</p>
<p>I never stepped foot on campus until the day my parents dropped me off</p>
<p>We lost touch with classmates after we left for college.</p>
<p>The phone in our dorm room opened up in a little cubby that could be accessed between two rooms. One phone for four girls.</p>
<p>The class schedule was in a book that we used to find classes.</p>
<p>The cafeteria did not serve dinner on Sundays.</p>
<p>i do not recall a single person from my PA hs class of over 650 who applied to an out of state public school.</p>
<p>I. I went to a single sex, male, college. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
2. Our cafeteria was a left over lend lease airplane hanger destined for Russia that never made it.
3. Some of our classes were in Quonset huts.
4. We had one pay phone on each dorm floor.
5. There were no televisions in the dorm.
6. There was no security on campus to speak of and there were no cops with guns.
7. There were no coed dorms and our sister female college did not allow men in the girls’ dorm rooms.
8. I didn’t drink before I was 21.
9. My college wouldn’t let the football team go to a bowl game.
10. Students trooped over to the student center to watch Soupy Sales.
11. We had dances where the males wore ties and jackets.
12. Ties and jackets were worn to football games.
13. Freshmen wore beanies and college ties.
14. The marching band wore straw hats and blazers.</p>
<p>I’m from the west coast and my college was a known “party school” but that’s not why I wanted to go there (ha ha).</p>
<p>I only applied to two schools and typed my applications.</p>
<p>We watched music videos on HBO (at my boyfriend’s frat) that were shown after a movie ended and before they started the next movie. They kept rotating the same 5 videos.</p>
<p>I remember when my roommates and I returned to the apartment we were sharing after spring break and we had MTV. We kept the TV on all night and stayed home from class the next day watching videos!</p>
<p>Beer at the on campus pub was $2 a pitcher on Friday afternoons.</p>
<p>Girls wore Dolphin shorts, K-swiss tennis shoes and Lacoste shirts to class.</p>
<p>Somehow we got “special” phone numbers we could call from the payphones in the dorm lobby and then we were able to call anywhere in the country for free. We had phones in our rooms but didn’t call these numbers from them.</p>
<p>We did not have meal plans for the weekends so we would budget how much to spend on beer versus food! </p>
<p>Everyone I knew at school had a fake ID.</p>
<p>The meal plan was 13 meals a week, including only one meal on Sunday.</p>
<p>I had $50/month to cover all expenses, including the other meals. My rule was that Sunday dinner had to cost less than $2.00 (maybe it was $1…can’t remember)</p>
<p>My room had its own, wall mounted rotary phone!</p>
<p>There may have been a TV somewhere in the dorm</p>
<p>People smoked everywhere.</p>
<p>Renting a refrigerator was a BIG expense. Most of us would sneak butter, cheese, and such from the cafeteria and hang it outside our windows in drawstring plastic bags from the bookstore when the weather was cool.</p>
<p>Microwaves did not exist. We could have coffee makers in our rooms. Many broke the rules and had toasters and electric fry pans.</p>
<p>No word processing, so “cut and paste” for me was writing my papers in longhand on yellow legal pads and then cutting them up and reordering them on the floor before typing them up. Usually at 4 a.m.</p>
<p>No graphing calculators. If you wanted to see that curve described by the equation, you methodically plotted the solutions.</p>
<p>I had a “programmable calculator,” which was a Big Deal. I used it to play Battle Ship.</p>
<p>HP vs. TI was that era’s version of PC vs. Mac.</p>
<ol>
<li>Hair
…a. The girls on my floor cut each others’ hair.</li>
</ol>
<p>…b.I gave haircuts to my male friends right before they went home to see their parents on vacations, hoping to find an acceptable difference so they wouldn’t return to campus with a parent-required haircut from the family barber.</p>
<p>…c. I didn’t charge any money for it. I figured it was my way of being “part of the solution.”</p>
<ol>
<li>I outlined my notes.</li>
</ol>
<p>…a. Sometimes I indented.</p>
<p>…b. Other times, I didn’t.</p>
<p>…c. If I knew the topic was complicated, I began the outline with Roman Numerals and Capital Letters.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Most girls I knew owned one purse.</p></li>
<li><p>Most boys I knew had one girlfriend and even knew her middle name. Certainly knew her last name.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I started the root canal thread.</p>
<p>“No word processing, so “cut and paste” for me was writing my papers in longhand on yellow legal pads and then cutting them up and reordering them on the floor before typing them up. Usually at 4 a.m.”</p>
<p>Oh mafool, I tried to explain this to my d last week. We used to push our apartment furniture against the wall to accommodate all the cut sheets of yellow notebook paper.</p>
<p>MTV was born.
We watched MTV on a 13" black and white TV.</p>
<p>OK, the line of age demarkation is was the phone IN the room or was it DOWN the hall and shared by all or “monitored” by someone at a desk. Most telling is if your parents dropped you off at the door of your dorm after removing your trunk and typewriter and their tires spun gravel hightailing it out of there…a wonderous moment I will never forget.</p>
<p>My rotary dial phone was in the room. I don’t think it worked for long distance. There was a pay phone in the basement for that. My boyfriend had just a pay phone down the hall. We mostly wrote letters. </p>
<p>I had a manual typewriter because the electric version cost too much. I was an English major, philosophy minor, and a major memory of college is typing the darn papers all night, trying to get everything right so you didn’t have to retype pages.</p>
<p>Dorm food was pretty yucky. There was a much better “Grill” in the basement, but you had to pay for that. </p>
<p>You had to trek to the bookstore (huge campus) and then haul all those heavy books back to the dorm. Now the bookstore delivers to the dorm!</p>
<p>Several of us had small, black and white TVs in our rooms. I had no tape player or stereo system, just a clock radio. No car. </p>
<p>Registration was a huge, complex procedure in the field house with IBM punch cards in a packet. By grad school, computerized registration was just coming in.</p>
<p>Researching anything was so much harder. You had to know your way around the library. To research grad schools, you asked for the grad school catalogs at the library.</p>
<p>“I typed my application on a manual typewriter and then drove to the post office to mail it.” Wow, you TYPED it, rockville mom?</p>
<p>BF typed my papers!</p>
<p>1) I was a first generation student but nobody cared
2) People were paid for not only typing papers, but also for typing lecture notes (me)
3) yes, punchcards…I think they were used for registration?
4) speaking of registration, I remember waiting on line in the gym on a hot August day to register
5) I cannot recall anyone who applied early decision (did it even exist in the late 70’s?) but I do remember that there were waitlists.
6) my college town had many clubs/bars that college students kept in business…18 yr old drinking age…and no, we didn’t have any problems.
7)I estimate that close to 50% of the people I was friends with married their college bf/gf and are still married.</p>
<p>Wow, I can relate to so much of this.</p>
<ol>
<li>I never set foot on my college campus till move in day</li>
<li>Never heard of SAT prep courses</li>
<li>Everyone ate at the cafeteria because that was the only place to get a meal on campus and it was paid for by the meal plan that nearly everyone had</li>
<li>No doz and coffee were what kept us up for all nighters</li>
<li>The tech geeks could get free phone calls from the pay phones, whereas now it’s free movies, shows on the internet</li>
<li> No cable. One room on our floor had a tv from home</li>
<li>The dorms were bare bones, no lofts, no air conditioning</li>
<li>No vending machines</li>
<li>Tab</li>
<li>The hot pot for hot water
11.No one had a credit card</li>
<li>That first HP calculator knocked my socks off with what it could do and it cost what a lap top now does.</li>
<li>We had punch cards for computer class and had to learn FORTRAN and COBOL
14.We had to use The Reader’s Guide to Periodic Literature"
15 No ids for beer and wine at the school rathskeller
16 Outlined
17 Monarch notes
18 No lofting beds
19 Typed papers. Got high on correction fluid
17 Hall Phone that got answered by whoever happened to walk by when it rang
18 room and board was more expensive than the tuition at a private college</li>
</ol>
<p>Oh, yes,
High tech meant you had top of the line stereo system.</p>
<p>1) IBM 360 Computer … with no keyboard entry
2) National Merit? What’s that?
3) Attendance taken in classes (even Bio 100!).
4) Being failed for missing too many classes.
5) Fail one class, lecture from Dad. Fail two classes, Vietnam.
6) Mid-court seats (free!) for basketball games
7) The “rock concert” was The Association.
8) No meals after Friday lunch (even if you had a Saturday class!)
9) No phones, no TVs, no radios, no refrigerators, etc. in the dorms … you needed to go to the Student Union for those.</p>
<p>can you say “microfiche”???..</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The only kids who took the SAT more than once were the dumb kids.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My S was coveting one of those. My sister found hers from the late eighties and gave it to him for Christmas. He was delighted and pounds away at the thing! Uh, honey – you have a freakin’ laptop!</p>
<p>Oh - and when your parents flew you home, they mailed you a paper ticket well in advance.</p>