Going to a smaller school with a limited faculty/class schedule, my drop/add was primarily to get better class times. I think my auditing class only had 2 sections with the same professor. Since I lived off campus senior year, I tried to arrange my schedule so the classes were consecutive. Second semester, I was done no later than 11:30. I only dropped for professors twice, both times to get away from profs that I had had before and didn’t like.
2019-Whenever Misc. Grab Bag Thread
- Thread starter jeffbear
- Start date
LJG
Well-known member
I signed up for 18 hours of SoD core classes that semester. WTF was I thinking??? A truly boneheaded move. I dropped Pat Rand's Modern Housing Prototypes. Still have the textbook, however.
At State the only people who had it worse than ROTC students were athletes in non-revenue sports. They had the same academic loads as everybody else with no breaks for travel and practice schedules. I knew a couple of guys who managed engineering degrees while playing golf or baseball and they all had a full 5 years plus every full summer session just to get their labs and special projects in. Bless 'em, because they worked for those degrees.
And in our day, there was no such thing as online classes. Of course, the conferences were more geographically compact, so the teams weren‘t missing a week of classes to journey out to Stanford and Cal.
Baseball and golf guys routinely missed multiple days of class in a week, even with less mileage to travel. It's just the nature of the sports. One of my best friends played on the baseball team at State and he'd have to try to schedule his class load as heavy as possible in the Fall, load up as much as he could on the two summer sessions (not easy because State only offered 3 and 4 hour classes in one of the two summer sessions) and take as many lightweight, term paper and final exam heavy electives as he could in Spring Session when he was playing ball. His kid played for College of Charleston a few years ago and it was completely different thanks to online classes. My buddy got his degree in mechanical engineering but it took him 5 full years of slogging. His kid got a degree in finance and had half of his MBA at USC (entirely online) finished in 4 years.
HurryCanes
Well-known member
In my day there was no “online” in existence
Yeah ... same for me (and Andy, I think). I got my first PC when I was a junior in college, and my class schedule was still done on punch cards.In my day there was no “online” in existence
I’m a few years older than you, I think. I didn’t touch a PC until I was out in the world, I taught myself how to use Lotus 1-2-3 while working on an audit, sometime around 1984-85ish.
LJG
Well-known member
In my day they were lines of coke.In my day there was no “online” in existence
LJG
Well-known member
I used something called an Alpha-Micro for word processing here in the mid to late 80s. We used it for energy modeling.
My first real intensive computer use started in the late 80s when we got some personal desktops and started using DataCad, an architect-centric program. I fucking hate AutoCAD.
When we first started lots of CAD drawing, I would dream in CAD and had to mouse to the command bar at the left of my brain to move on in the dream. It probably had nothing to do w/ the 10 bong hits during the course of my evenings.
My first real intensive computer use started in the late 80s when we got some personal desktops and started using DataCad, an architect-centric program. I fucking hate AutoCAD.
When we first started lots of CAD drawing, I would dream in CAD and had to mouse to the command bar at the left of my brain to move on in the dream. It probably had nothing to do w/ the 10 bong hits during the course of my evenings.
I'm afraid my story is more ancient. When I was in college ('71-75) we had access to a Honeywell time-sharing main-frame computer with terminals scattered around campus. We stored our projects on paper tape. My research was in computational chemistry, so when they switched the computer from time-sharing to batch mode at 2 AM, I would feed in several boxes of punch cards with Fortran programming and data. If any got mangled during the loading, I would re-type the card and put it back in the correct place. In the morning, my professor or I would go pick up reams of paper with the output - if and only if the program ran correctly.
cmaleski2
Well-known member
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) via green screen dumb terminals was all the rage when I was at UCONN from 90-94. Even as a Computer Science and Engineering major, I didn't have my own PC in he early 90s. We did work on Macs in a lab, UNIX workstations in a lab, and on x86 machines in a lab or at the library.
We had PCs and floppys when I was in college, so I can't relate to those who had to deal with punch cards. I have done mainframe work though almost the entirety of my professional career even having never had exposure to mainframes in college. While there are much fancier front ends to the mainframe now, I still am most comfortable with the old regular green screen emulators. Tape isn't generally a thing anymore for mainframes unless you are offloading data for secure backups. Even then tape is not necessarily the go to media. Storage costs finally came down to the point that you didn't need to offload data onto 'cheaper tape'. I also had exposure to the old 'Green Bar printers' that were tied to mainframes back in the day.
Once we started learning how to mess with Dos and Windows 3 we would code and load up obnoxious things onto lab and library computers that would do things such as remap the keyboard or randomly invert the screen every 10 minutes. Very useful endeavors. The internet existed when I was in college, but there were no web browsers or anything like that. It was still mostly an academic endeavor, useful only to share data across networks. Command lines only.
We had PCs and floppys when I was in college, so I can't relate to those who had to deal with punch cards. I have done mainframe work though almost the entirety of my professional career even having never had exposure to mainframes in college. While there are much fancier front ends to the mainframe now, I still am most comfortable with the old regular green screen emulators. Tape isn't generally a thing anymore for mainframes unless you are offloading data for secure backups. Even then tape is not necessarily the go to media. Storage costs finally came down to the point that you didn't need to offload data onto 'cheaper tape'. I also had exposure to the old 'Green Bar printers' that were tied to mainframes back in the day.
Once we started learning how to mess with Dos and Windows 3 we would code and load up obnoxious things onto lab and library computers that would do things such as remap the keyboard or randomly invert the screen every 10 minutes. Very useful endeavors. The internet existed when I was in college, but there were no web browsers or anything like that. It was still mostly an academic endeavor, useful only to share data across networks. Command lines only.
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Fayettenamcanesfan
Well-known member
That’s my timeframe for college as well. Our version of online chat rooms was this thing called ISCA. Some dudes at Iowa State developed. Iowa State Chat something or other. I met some chicks from St Bonaventure tennis team that led to an ill advised drive for me and my friends from NC to St Bonaventure Ny. Unfortunately you couldn’t share photos back then so we were going in blind. We thought all tennis girls were hot. We. Were. Wrong. We snuck out in the middle of the night and drove all the way down to Myrtle beach for the rest of our spring break.
StormChaserBH
Well-known member
Fun grab bag diversion! I used my HS's first TRS-80 around '81/'82, almost instantly realized programming computers was my future, got my own TRS-80 with cassette tape storage in '83, and programmed with those infamous punch cards at my local CC in '83/'84 taking early college classes. Never saw the punch cards at university (where I bought my first hockey season tickets and spent a lot of time in that old hockey barn BTW) though, they had just gotten labs full of terminals and also PC's. My folks invested in a PC for me and I bootlegged all the software apps -- and games -- I needed; No available internet yet, but 1500 baud modems over dialup from my apartment to the university data center or online BBS's was the bomb. My first tech internship & first 'real' job as a mainframe app programmer from '87-'91, from then onto OS internals (OS/2, mostly the networking protocols), mainframe app integration & developer tools, and now Healthcare IT for a dozen years. Been quite a ride!
LJG
Well-known member
My best friend and I used to play some football game on some type of terminal in the early to mid 70s. His dad was an IT guy for Corning and would lug this terminal, printer, and modem home on occasion, so Andy and I would hook it up for some digital football. Had to place the old phone receiver on the modem and let it do its thing. We'd have to punch in some command on the keyboard, then the printer would print out the results of the play then punch in another play, etc. etc.
Damn, I hadn't thought of that in decades!
Damn, I hadn't thought of that in decades!