<p>Freshman meal plan was 20 meals per week in THE freshman dining hall. 2 choices per meal, or PB&J. We did have a salad bar. Soph & up - mealplan was “pick a frat to eat at.” One snack bar, served hamburgers & fries.</p>
<p>One payphone and one “hall phone” on each hall in the dorm. The Hall Phone only called within campus. The pay phone called off campus. My parents called me every Sunday at 1:30 (the rates were lower). I wrote letters to my hs friends at other colleges.</p>
<p>I loved typing papers because that meant I was done writing them. There was no revising once something was typed!</p>
<p>Computers were in labs. You put in your programming, then waited for it to compile. If it was midnight and you were the only one on the system, it could compile in under 20 seconds. If it was 2 pm and there every terminal was full, it could take 5 minutes. </p>
<p>Course selection was done on pieces of paper. There was no picking sections - times and professors. You took what you got. </p>
<p>I applied to 2 colleges. </p>
<p>And I missed all the Final Episode of MASH parties because I had a big exam the next day!</p>
<p>Make friends with a girl running registration so you go in early. The punch cards for the classes would be stacked. Once the cards were gone, the class was full.</p>
<p>Freshman chemistry required a slide rule since all kids could not afford a calculator</p>
<p>Did square roots by hand</p>
<p>Half the Trig and Stat books were algorithms </p>
<p>Listened to records in the library. You could check out records</p>
<p>Remember a question in a Intro to Music class. True or false-“Only women bleed”.</p>
<p>Entered the Engineering Dept contest of tossing an egg of the roof of the Science building and not breaking it. </p>
<p>Played intramural soccer against Professors (always European)</p>
<p>Would check out microfilm on old newspapers to see what happened on the day you were born.</p>
<p>Skip class to play Fireball pinball game</p>
<p>Would take a date to the Laserium show at Griffith Park observatory. Smoke a joint in line with the other people that were going to watch a laser show with Pink Floyd.</p>
<p>Parent sez:
Jug red wine +assorted cut up fruit=sangria
Green Apple Boones Farm
No Starbucks, No Mr. Coffee-made “percolated” coffee
B/W TV had rabbit ears pointed towards the window and strategic placement of tin foil to improve picture
TV stations signaled off at 12am with a picture of the American flag waving and the dramatic playing of the “Star Spangled Banner” then went to static
ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS only 4 TV channels</p>
<p>Big preparation for the SAT was coming home early from a party the night before.</p>
<p>Used a manual typewriter. It was a beautiful one that I now keep as an antique. </p>
<p>Talking to my Dad, who was only 100 miles away, was not a daily event as it cost money. I wish we had spoken more frequently; he died at the beginning of my second quarter.</p>
<p>A walk down memory lane
Fortran and Cobol, seeing someone drop their punch cards on the floor and crying. BIG Computers
No Starbucks
Dining Halls in very dorm, nothing flex ate all 3 meals in dorm.
No one had TV’s in room, smallish one in the lounge
Calculators had cords
Took the SAT once, applied to one school accepted. Did not think about the college acceptance process. Lived in Indiana. For Engineering/Agriculture you went to Purdue, for Business, Law, liberal arts you went to IU. to teach, Ball State U.
No air in dorms
No Monster, Red Bull, energy drinks</p>
OMG… yes. That is a win.<br>
The guys would get their girlfriends to punch their cards for them.<br>
When I took Fortran I would say a Hail Mary everytime I ran my cards. I prayed alot!</p>
<p>Ugh, I was in grad school for Fortran and Cobol (I remember it was Fortran 4 and Cobol 3), standing in crazy high heels we wore with the man suits and little scarf ties in a long line after a full day of work praying and praying my cards would run when it was my turn. Not fond memories.</p>
<p>Bathrub parties, everyone brought what booze they had and dumped it all in a bathtub(hopefully a clean one, but no telling) and mixed it up. Yum-yuck! Grain alcohol…</p>
<p>Stole trays from the cafeteria to sled on in the snow. No air conditioning in any dorm. </p>
<p>Speaking of punched card drops, in one CS course we had “The Queue” which consisted of rows of punched cards awaiting their turn to run. You would set your cards at the end of the line, comprised of thousands of punched cards from many students, and wait for somebody (whatever fellow classmate it was that happened to be standing at the head of the line) to pick up the next set of cards and place them in the hopper, push the button and watch them get sucked into the reader. Then you watched the cute little PDP 11 flash it’s lights while it processed that job. Talk about prayer - you hoped to high heaven that these kids in line ahead of you would not screw up your deck. The protocol was that you stood there waiting for your job to run and would do the setting-in yourself if you happened to be in place at the right time, but usually somebody had muscled in and was loading for others. One fellow dropped his set as he unloaded, said something on the order of ‘the heck with it’, stomped over the cards on the floor, grabbed the printout and left.</p>
<p>Surely CS classes are a little bit easier today?</p>
<p>“Surely CS classes are a little bit easier today?”</p>
<p>Oh YES!!! Twenty years ago I was finishing up my Masters degree. Our class was given a debugging project … not one of those easy ones where the flaw appears regularly, but rather one with (what the Prof thought was) two subtle intermittent flaws. While my partner and I were chasing those down, a couple of our high-energy classmates created several dozen debugging programs and were running them (in background, thankfully) on EVERY computer they could log onto.</p>
<p>Yes they found the two intermittent flaws. They also found three additional program flaws the Prof wasn’t even aware of.</p>
<p>We had a PDP-11 running RSTS-11 (time-sharing system) that had RJE (Remote Job Entry) to the IBM 360 that processed batch jobs from the card-reader. You could edit your program on terminals (these were typewriter terminals; not terminals with monitors) and then submit them to the mainframe for remote job entry. So much easier than punched cards. I think that all CS students should get to create and run a punched card program at some point in their educations. Finding working models of card machines and card readers would be a challenge today though.</p>
<p>My slide rule was cordless. Handheld calculators were just coming out and cost a fortune (>$100) for a simple four function model. Since only a few could afford them, none of us were allowed to use them on exams.</p>
<p>No coed dorms and women’s dorms had curfew hours.</p>
<p>No food courts - just the cafeteria run by the Dining Services.</p>
<p>There were commercial typing services, but my younger sister had been state typing champ in the FBLA competitions in high school. So once she showed up on campus I got her to type all my papers. For me typing a page of text took an hour. For her typing ten pages took only a few minutes.</p>
<p>A decade later when I was finishing up my PhD, my dissertation was the first one ever in the history of the department to be typed on this new device called a “word processor,” which was an actual separate device and not merely a program on a computer. My professor was so smitten with his new toy that he had the department secretary type my dissertation for me just to try it out. I was saved an incredible amount of typing and retyping drudgery.</p>
<p>Good news. Today I don’t feel as ancient as yesterday. A friend of mine, just a few years older than me isn’t connected to the internet. She told me today that I must be making things up because she’s never heard half the stuff I find out there. If it’s not on tv, it doesn’t exist. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.</p>