Pomona College (my alma mater) made the Top 20 list for PC Magazine’s evaluation of “Most Wired Colleges.”
Back in the day, we were (for a liberal arts place) pretty progressive, computer-wise. We had one of the first IBM 4331s released, available for student and faculty use (bear in mind that PCs were just barely toys at the time), and one of my first jobs as Systems Programmer Intern (which was my entre into the whole Computer Biz) was to oversee an upgrade to VM/SP2 on the new 4341. There were numerous computer labs around the campus. And, of course, there were the VAX systems up at Harvey Mudd
and the like.
Of course, that was chicken feed compared to today, when dorm rooms are wired, wireless is all over the place, dorms have computer labs, and all that jazz.
Still, kind of cool to see the old stomping grounds mentioned in this context.
I remember going to a friend’s college computer lab around 1980 to play “Star Trek” on the computer. You remember: the Enterprise was an “E,” Klingon ships were “K,” and asterisks represented the stars. Great fun for those primitive times.
Without a doubt, the most kick-ass computer thing we had was very similar. Someone had programmed an multi-player Star Trek battle game in APL — either of which was a wildly impressive feat. (Players were one of several races, sniping at each other, with Andorian pirates as the PvE just to keep things interesting).
The sysadmins hated it, as it could bring performance on the mainframe to a halt if you had more than a dozen or so players on there. Periodic attempts to delete the executable module from folks’ accounts were generally unsuccessful.
Good times indeed.
I bank with U.S. Bank. I have been with them for about two years now, and have never had a problem, but then again I know how to balance my check book and do it regularly.
Dave, what about your states attorney general, or the BBB?…….Have you tryed taking legal action against usbank?…
I can still remember the professor’s dislike of computer printer papers – some wouldn’t accept them at all and other only when printer on the flywheel printer rather than the dot matrix. Now student submit papers online. Imagine my grade point average if I had had a spell checker!
I didn’t discover the “use a text editor as a word processor and print out your papers on the dot matrix printer” technique until my senior year. And, yes, for “real” papers, they had to be typewritten, or professionally typed, or printed on the one, lone Spinwriter locked away in the computer room for use by the faculty.
Imagine the added amount of sleep one might get if one could use a real word processor and update drafts without having to retype the freaking page (or fiddle with White-out or little eraser papers, etc.).
[Not sure why Saul is commenting here, rather than on the “US Bank Sucks” pages, but …]
So how DID I convince you (or was it Sue Greenway) to allow me to print my senior thesis on the Spinwriter?
I don’t recall, so it might have been Sue.
Some seniors were, via connections, privileged enough to borrow use of the Spinwriter. Others of us had to actually work there make use of it. 🙂