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Education The Internet

Has the Internet Changed College? 91

Posted by Cliff from the understanding-undergrads dept.
gosand asks: "When I began college in 1988, it was the first time I was able to interact with a large group of very different people. This helped me to see the world in different aspects, and helped to make me who I am today. During my college days I formed/reformed many of my opinions on things, although refining them has been a continual process. I often wonder how my experience might have been different if the internet, as it exists today, would have been around then. Sure, there was gopher, ftp, and BBSs, but only a relatively few people knew about them and used them. There wasn't online gaming to lure you away from your studies for hours at a time. If you wanted music, you went to the used CD store or joined Columbia House and BMG 5 times under different names. You had to actually communicate with people in person instead of email, and you had to go to the library and do your research from books. You only had a computer if you were in CS, and sometimes not even CS students had them. I am not suggesting that one way is better than the other, just noting the differences. Have computers and the internet made college life any easier in some respects? Have they made it harder? How has the internet affected your opinions on things during these formative years? These may seem like easy questions, but I have a feeling that there are a wide range of opinions out there."
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Has the Internet Changed College? More

Has the Internet Changed College?

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  • pr0n (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @11:22AM (#6115317)
    You also forgot how it made porn much easier to get for the college student
  • What? Huh? It was GOING to college, and a particular one?

  • mudding (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mozkill ( 58658 )
    when i started college in 1989, i used to telnet in to play the Twin Peaks MUD. even then, it only took 1 hour of my time each time i sat down. 1 year later, my friends in their dorm rooms would spend mabye 1 or 2 hours at a time on Nintendo.

    in any case, its nothing like sitting and playing Diablo for days on end...
    • i remember in the bbs days my only limits to the time i spent dialing in was in how many accounts*minutes i was allowed on. and even then, i would spend the rest of the time looking for new boards to join.
    • This is probably where things have changed the most. Alright, doing research is easier and can be done at 2 am before a paper is due and such. But the basic search and find skills required to operate a search engine are not that much different than a card catolouge. Being in college, and having just completed a group project, I'd say that, that much has not changed really. Groups still get together, and don't use email as much as you'd think, even in my CS project, most of what we decided was via face t

  • Yes (Score:3, Insightful)

    by p4ul13 ( 560810 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @11:32AM (#6115412) Homepage
    Yes it did.
    Next topic!

    Has it gotten easier? In some respects maybe. Has it gotten more effective? Very likely in that more people who go to school to learn something like programming have access to actual computers to work out their problems on and aren't forced to work purely in theory.

    A couple years ago as an undergrad I was a lowsy programmer. I was on an all PC campus and had my powermac with me, so I couldn't do any of the programming assignments without heading over to one of the labs. Now, as a grad student we're programming in Java, and I can do my development on my latest Mac, so I can do coding into the wee hours on my own machine. That ability to experiment with the language on my own time has made learning new things much easier.
    • Yes it did.
      Next topic!

      For the record, the story was submitted with the title (How) Has the Internet Changed College. I put the "how" in there because I know it has, but I am not sure of the scope of how it has. Has it affected registration in any way? Textbook purchasing? Dating? (what is your email vs what is your phone #) Time management skills? Off-time activities? Are there LAN parties? How has it affected the non-tech major?

      I was hoping for some interesting stories and experiences, not just

      • As a sometimes lazy person in college, I can say that a lot of the tedious/annoying things that needed to be done were much aided by the college network. Like, if I had to go to the library to look up some little fact, I just wouldn't have done it.

        Also, it means you can sometimes get things done in off hours that normally you would have to do during the day, like signing up for classes, turning in assignments, asking a prof/student a question, etc.

        And as a language student, I can say that a few really dec
  • But back in 1988 - hell, back in 1978, if you wanted content, you didn't look for a computer. Here in 2003, you still have to take a lantern to find content on most websites. There was a brief (halcyon) period before the spammers and banner-ad-mongers came on the scene when there was some useful stuff that was untarnished by commercial imperatives.

    Seems we have to work a lot harder to separate the wheat from the chaff now.

    • And to add to this thought:

      Sure, there was gopher, ftp, and BBSs, but only a relatively few people knew about them and used them.

      Weren't those the glory days, though? Damn, did not have every AOL dumbass in the world online, and the government did not even know the internet existed, even though they created it (Thanks Al Gore!). People complain about the companies turning the internet into TV. Sorry, already happened, not happening.

  • Nobody knows (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RealityMogul ( 663835 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @11:38AM (#6115475)
    It doesn't matter what people's opinions are on this subject. The people that didn't have the Internet in college can't offer any insight in to whether or not its any easier, or even any different because they only experienced it one way. Same thing with the people that did have the Internet available.

    Just look at your own life and see how the Internet has changed things in your daily routines and there's the effect it has kids going to college right now.

    All you're really going to get is people talking about piracy and porn when it comes to this topic on /.
    • You forget one obvious exception: those of us who got first degrees when computers were scarce, and returned to school when they were much more prevalent.
      Before my senior year of college I had never even heard of the internet. By the time I returned for my MS, it was everywhere. No more long lines for registration or payment issues, etc. Access to Lexis-Nexis and many other expensive databases for free (now that I completed my degree, I miss this a lot). Best of all: being able to talk directly to experts i
    • It has probably drastically cut down people going to see the prof during his office hours to ask silly little questions and also improves professor to class communication. Email does the same thing as well.
      While it may have improved prof to class communcation, prof to student communication/relations has probably slid for the same reason - the number of people going to office hours for this type of thing (and then getting into another conversation) has dropped.

  • School/Student relationship (Score:3, Insightful)

    by araven ( 71003 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @11:40AM (#6115496)
    Working at a University, one change seems to be the position of the school in its role of protecting the academic freedom of students. Traditionally, schools would handle discipline problems internally, often protecting students from law enforcement for minor infractions. That protective layer, acting formally or informally "in loco parentis" let students stretch their wings a little, with a corresponding benefit to academics and research. The Internet has brought the world into the campus. For example, schools now struggle to protect their students from the RIAA, while balancing political necessity. Many schools now actually act, to some degree, as enforcers on behalf of copyright owners. That shift puts the school and the students into more adversarial positions than may have existed before the Internet was big. In the past, schools could "look the other way" or just issue "warnings" while students pushed the envelope of what was and was not allowed, now security concerns and the concerns of private industry have made campuses much less safe places for students to test the waters and try things out.

    Many University administrators see that problem very clearly, and try to strike a politically surviveable balance to keep academic freedom alive.

    ~
    • Totally off the subject, but just FYI your sig quote is wrong.. It's "A Foolish Consistency..." (totally changes the meaning... nothing foolish about just plain old consistency).
    • I would think that most schools still protect and support the academic freedom of their students.

      I think that you're talking about schools looking the other way at underage drinking and the other excesses that teenagers can get into when away from parental authority for the first time. For the most parts I think schools still do this, maybe getting a little stricter, but I doubt much more adversarial than before.

      I think you're saying that when it was a student pissing on someone's front yard at 2 in the m

      • Good points. What I'm getting at is that the Internet has brought a world of claims and considerations into campus. The schools are forced to deal with those liability issues they didn't have before, forcing them into a more adversarial position with the students. Misuse of school property has always been a problem, of course, but a kid sneaking into a building at night and doing something non-destructive might have gotten a slap on the wrist in the past. Today, the Internet on campus gives the kid a who

  • Absolutely (Score:2, Insightful)

    by chuckcolby ( 170019 ) *
    This is a very interesting question, because you're sort of asking how the Internet has altered a particular group.

    It's interesting to me that my son has never known what vinyl LP's look like, has never known of a day without cell phones, and doesn't understand how the Internet revolutionized the way information is spread about. He uses it to play, to listen to music, to research homework, and communicate (not necessarily in that order).

    There's a ton more information available now than in my college days.

    • Re:Absolutely (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ichimunki ( 194887 )
      Sure, one can go to the library and get reams of information, but it's not sorted, as if I had typed in a search request to a popular search engine.

      You're kidding, right? Have you ever been to a library? They are insanely sorted. They make Google look like a haphazard mess by comparison. I have to admit that the Library of Congress classification system doesn't get me excited the way the Dewey Decimal system does, but card catalogs and decent shelving habits never prevented me from finding stuff I was lo
      • Most libraries I've used in the past 5 years or so, have moved the card catalog online and they buy the worst search engine I've ever seen. It took me an hour to find a copy of the last book I was looking for, at our local library. The college library card catalog did have a good search engine, but for most of the public libraries I've used I whish they'd stick to the old index cards.
        • If you are having that much trouble finding a book, why wouldn't you just ask a librarian for help? They live for that stuff. They went to college for that stuff. They get paid to do that stuff. On top of that, they are there all day every day doing that stuff, so they are probably pretty good at it.
    • Sure, one can go to the library and get reams of information, but it's not sorted, as if I had typed in a search request to a popular search engine.

      You really don't believe that, do you? Not only are libraries sorted better (no matter which system they use) than Google, everything in the library can be verified. I'm willing to bet that 90% of the stuff that's listed by Google is crap anyway. Who would want to search through that? Published books are verifiable sources of information. You can't go wrong. T
  • The internet has changed almost everything about how we use, view, find, and explore information. Mas it made things easier or more difficult? I doubt either. You still have to understand how to formulate the information you find, and deduce conclusions from it. You still have to present it in a correct format. You lose a huge social value in the college experience though, and that may well be too bad. College computer labs used to be 'places to go', they used to be communities as well as places to work. No

  • email and office hours (Score:3, Informative)

    by adso ( 469590 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @11:52AM (#6115621)
    I now teach at the university I attended in the early 80's as an undergrad, so I have a little before-and-after vision regarding this. Email has, IMO, really changed things. Students rarely bother coming to office hours, which I typically spend replying to a steady stream of email about assignments and such. I regard this as a good thing. The communication with students perhaps isn't as deep, but is certainly more accessible (I recall a few times where I was too intimidated to go to a professor's office hours).

  • How has the internet affected your opinions on things during these formative years?

    Apparently, it is now much easier to write term papers [collegetermpapers.com].
    • It's also alot easier to catch students who attempt to cheat in this manner. Students who try to lift papers from the web have no idea how easy it is to google part of a sentence from their work in quotes. I've had quite a few students who try to get away with this, and are amazed when they get caught. And usually very sorry when the fail the class.
      • I find online papers useful for finding sources since many of them have a listing of thier sources, it cuts down on the amount of time i need to good for info. I still write all my papers myself, but read the papers of others can give you a jump start when you're stuck.
        We'll also note my slashdot commenting style does _not_ reflect my academic writing style.
      • It's also alot easier to catch students who attempt to cheat in this manner. Students who try to lift papers from the web have no idea how easy it is to google part of a sentence from their work in quotes. I've had quite a few students who try to get away with this, and are amazed when they get caught. And usually very sorry when the fail the class.

        Well maybe if they didn't copy paste and actually put a little work into it they could get away with it.

  • Technologies like IM, virtual whiteboards & collaboration software has made group projects, lab work & research easier. Data, facts & knowledge used to be centrally located in the university library. Low cost PCs & internet connectivity have usurped the "central knowledge source" attribute of the library. I have heard non-CS/IT students (photo & fine art majors) say, "Just look it up on the web." when just a few years ago they would have to consult a journal or book for their art class.
    • Technologies like IM...

      I absolutely hated IM at college. Not because I used it, but because, in a lab of 50 computers, several people would be using it with the speakers turned on.

      Imagine, every three seconds at random positions in the lab a "Boop beep" followed a few seconds later by a "Beep boop". It was immensely irritating. And the worst thing: the students doing it couldn't have cared less they were disrupting everyone else.

      I guess this post is actually on topic, where technology allows people (
  • What hasnt the internet changed in one way or another.

  • Course Web Sites (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rlowe69 ( 74867 ) <ryanlowe_AThotmailDOTcom> on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @12:03PM (#6115735) Homepage
    One thing I can't believe people lived without were class web sites. On one page I can see:

    - course syllabus
    - assignment/lab report/essay due dates
    - exams dates
    - (sometimes) class notes
    - marks
    - how to contact the professor (email, phone, office hours, etc)

    It has probably drastically cut down people going to see the prof during his office hours to ask silly little questions and also improves professor to class communication. Email does the same thing as well.

    Of course it also makes students lazy. :)

    Archived class web sites are also useful for research. I can't count the number of times I've found a useful bit of info on an old class web site from MIT or the like.
    • One thing I can't believe people lived without were class web sites.- course syllabus - assignment/lab report/essay due dates - exams dates - (sometimes) class notes - marks - how to contact the professor (email, phone, office hours, etc)

      It was called "paper." All a student had to do was save all those things in his PeeChee folder and he was all set. Class notes (at my Univ., at least) could be bought at the University Center from University approved note takers. The lazy thing? Maybe. The paper way took
  • The faculty, in some cases, aren't evolving with it. I've had some faculty members that welcomed laptops in the classroom, for example. We [ou.edu] have a wireless network [ou.edu], whihch makes it incredibly to take notes, and actually pay attention in class, rather than scribble furiously and pray that you can understand it later.

    Some, on the other hand (primarily faculty in the Liberal Arts fields, from my experience), don't want anything to do with the net. We have a couple of online course management solutions that let students track grades, turn in assignents, etc. online. I've had classes where the professor use it to distribute 1 thing: the syllabus.

    At OU [ou.edu], we've got a fairly progressive faculty (at least in the College of Engineering), I just feel sorry for those stuck in a place where everything's done by the book. literally.
    • Out of curiosity, what is your curriculum? Using a computer to take notes would have been an exercise in futility for me. I can type over 100 WPM, and I still wouldn't have been able to capture everything I did in the same context as with a pencil and notebook. To single out a few points...

      * Computers are loud. I can't imagine sitting in freshman Chemistry (population: 350) and listening to all those people type at once. Shoot me now. Likewise, I can't imagine a wireless group all receiving IMs at va
      • Computers can replicate information indefinitely. One person's notes can be spread to 350 computers in less than a minute.
        I don't even know why people bother taking notes, it's all in the book.
        • I have no idea what kind of classes you are/were taking, but the notes were definitely not 'all in the book' in my engineering classes. It was a common and proven notion that if you didn't attend class and take rigorous notes and ask questions to concepts you didn't get, you would fail. Engineering professors (electrical, in my case) teach a great deal of concepts outside of the book or, at least, in a different manor. Try to learn Laplace and Fourier transforms without the aid of notes and only relying
          • Teaching "outside the book" is also par for course in most liberal arts programs. If it was all in the book, you might as well just have a reading assignment on day 1 and come back for the exams.
          • I'm a programmer. I don't know anything about Fourier/Laplace transforms. I learned a lot of different languages and technologies, and never really bothered writing down anything since I can pick up a new language or API in minutes (a requirement in any company that forces you to use the flavour-of-the-week technology) just by looking at some reference material while coding.

            My professors usually picked a book, usually a Tannenbaum book, "recited" (in their own words) a subset of it in class, and at the end
            • I should have been more precise...there was never a programmng book I cracked in college for anything other than doing the homework. Programming is a completely different beast. You memorize the algorithms and then you use a reference chart for syntax. There weren't a lot of algorithms I needed notes on (maybe some of my Operating Systems classes...priority queueing and such), adding to a stack is pretty simple. That would be like taking notes on how to get to work (typically called 'directions')...unli
        • On the other hand, I don't know why people bother buying the book, it's all in the lecture.

          Of course, I tend not to take notes either, cause its all in my head (this doesn't always work, especially when I skip a week of classes to work on senior design)

        • When I was in university there were some courses I took notes in and some I did not, usually not taking notes for the easier or more interesting ones.

          What I found though was come final exams, I had to spend all my time studying for the "easier" and "intersting" ones but usually breezed through the exams for courses in which I took notes. There really is something to be said for how the act of writing something helps memory retention. To get the same benfit out of someone else's notes I imagine you would
          • Yes! Absolutely! Glad to see that someone understands this in the same manner I do...

            Taking notes is one form of increasing memory retention, and it's a very powerful one. Of course, if you can do the same thing with typing ... maybe. But I know that I can "transcribe" without memory while typing, even though I can't while writing.

            My suggestion - write first, then if you have time, type up later. This always cements the concepts in my mind.

            Oh, and I am a Math/Physics person, so I think this applies
        • For some people, taking notes, actually writing down the points which you think are important, helps you better organize and remember what was said in class. But, for some people, typing it also works. It depends on the brain.
        • One problem we've run in to here is CD's floating around with people's notes on them, past exams, homework solutions, and other goodies on them.

          I'm not sure if it's against the student code, but that's against my own morals. That sort of returns to my other post's point that it depends on the quality of the students, whether this is an issue or not.
      • I agree with everything you said and I am still in college (with "wired classes"). Laptops in classes are generally a bad idea. We have people playing games during class, chatting on MSN or whatever or writing reports for their job. I doubt than even half the people are using them for anything related to the class. If the class is so pointless or boring stay at home where you can do all those and more without interfering with other people's learning exprerience.
      • I'm pursuing an accelerated masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, and will be starting my 4th of 5 total years in August.

        Well, I was thinking of a couple of specific examples. In all of these courses, the professors have posted their own notes online in various formats, usually PDF or PPT. What usually happens is people will either bring in a laptop and just make extra notes every now and again ON the soft copy notes themselves. Generally, my experience has been that those are much mo
      • Don't forget Warcraft. Before I transferred, we used to play Warcraft 3 in class at Babson College. Other games were also played, but not as much. Warcraft 3 and AIM were the professor's arch nemesis. And, while the profs could turn off their classroom's Internet connection, the LAN still worked.

        I wasted so much of my life playing that game.

  • [In 1988] you had to actually communicate with people in person instead of email, and you had to go to the library and do your research from books.

    I don't know about you, but I got my first undergrad email account in 1985. And I was NOT a CS student, or even a science or engineering student. It was BITNET, not Internet, but I could email to Internet accounts through a gateway, could telnet to other folks' accounts at different universities, could use finger, could play a game with a number of different

  • I went to university from 1992-1996. I couldn't decide what I wanted to major in, so I didn't get a degree in that time. I quit school when it became obvious that the web was going to change everything. I had a sweet job offer at a software company and was all over it. Unlike many people who did this, I'm still gainfully employed. Now that the industry has settled down, I sometimes think about returning to finish my degree.

    If I returned to school now, I would expect to be a better student than before, partl

    • That would highly depend on what major you would be in. A massive knowledge of poor spelling, vitriol, immaturity, and pompous blathering is not going to be useful in any degree, except maybe Philosophy.

      As an engineer, I can say I've learned almost nothing from the Internet. There's a lot of what-if scenarios and photoshopped pictures, but little hard fact. It is of course invaluable if you are looking for a specific datasheet, and the company has made that available. But you don't magically absorb intelli
    • I was class of '94, and I finished my degree early this year. I'm happy I finished it, and it was a real eye opener in terms of revisiting school work after several years of real life.

      Good luck.

      Tom
  • I was a CpE in school, on the ACM programming team, etc, but my political and social views were still largely affected by the conversations had while sitting around at 5a on a tuesday, drunk, talking to my fraternity brothers in the KA house basement.

    You can't help but be affected by the college atmosphere, it's a completely different world than what 90% of the kids knew growing up. No parents, no curfews, complete (mostly) freedom. It's the first taste of adult life where you're on your own and required
  • Same thing with living in the country. I grew up in cities/suburbs, except for 4 years wa-ay out in the country during HS. After 25 years, I'm back in the country, due to a death in family. Except this time, even with only dialup, I don't feel trapped in the hinterlands. And, yes, I'm taking college classes online. It's different both ways. I'm going to college from 20 miles out in the country, and I like living here because a global perspective is only a local phone call away. (The national calling

  • Many thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tyreth ( 523822 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @01:10PM (#6116338)
    This question raises many other questions and interesting thoughts.

    I know christianity isn't popular on slashdot or amongst geeks (hackers portrait says we're rare but not unknown). Nonetheless, there is a verse in there which is pertinent to this conversation:

    "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase"

    I quote that mainly because I'm not sure we always take note of how different the world is from what it was. King Solomon commented on how there was nothing new under the sun. Under Chinese religion (can't remember exactly what), they say nothing is ever quite the same. I think both are true. We have changed so much, but we are essentially the same as those who went before us.

    What amazes me the most is how much the world has changed in 10, 20, 50 and 100 years. What amazes me more is just how quickly we can adapt to the change. Computers as we know them today weren't around 20 years ago. A new technology comes out and people can learn it within a few days, weeks or months.

    I was thinking the other day about books, when I got my sharp zaurus. I thought, this is cool I can put books on this device and read them while I'm away. The gutenberg project gives me access to a wealth of information. I was in a shopping center at the time, and I looked around at all the people and thought, "we have so much wisdom available and hardly any of it is going to be touched". I wondered how many books we have at our fingertips that before the printing press people would have been delighted to get their hands on.

    But I digress a little. Nowadays we can travel hundreds of kilometers in less than an hour by means of aircraft. We can communicate virtually instantly with people all over the world. When we want, culture and political barriers can be circumvented. We have an unprecedented capacity to learn, and it's only going to increase in the future. And it just amazes me how quickly humans are able to adapt and comprehend the changes. Slashdotters are, in general, unique in the world in our ability to comprehend the changes. But the using of the technology is not so far off that your grandmother can't eventually learn it. Our generation will have lived and learned about rapid change. Even if we can no longer learn and understand what's behind it, we will be able to use it.

    I just think, so much has changed, yet essentially everything is the same. We eliminated hunger problems in rich countries so that we no longer need to work much to eat. Now people work for other things - electricity, internet access, computers, etc. If we ever make them as ubiquitous as air, then there will be something else to work for. I think this is a universal principle - we will *always* work no matter what changes. We'll just find new ways of doing what we already want to do, and faster, more efficiently. I think some of the primary ones (not true in all circumstances, but mostly): work, love, learning, life, communication.

    Anyway, there's no real coherency to these thoughts. Just reminding everyone of how much it's changed. It's sometimes hard for me to appreciate how much it's changed. I yearn new techology and the change it brings, so for me these things are not overpowering or daunting. I feel it's moving too slow. Yet most feel it's going too fast, and though it doesn't feel that way to me in general I have to agree - and step back and see it that way every now and then.

    • I'm convinced that one of the problems we have is that we haven't changed fast enough to keep up with the r/evolutions in technology. When you mention "we have so much wisdom available and hardly any of it is going to be touched", I think it speaks loudly to that issue. I don't find that a pessimistic view, rather it's another in the many warning bells going off we should be listening to, but seldom do.
      • Interesting thought, but warning signs of what? Ignoring this, what risk are we risking? Do you have any predictions of the outcome if we don't keep up with it? And can you envision a way that we can keep up?

        • For me it started as a vague feeling about a decade ago. It was a simple thing that triggered the thought, really. I gave my then 10 year old nephew a book he wanted on simple programming for Christmas, and in less than 48 hours, he devoured it. It was amazing how quickly he grasped the concepts, but when he tried to articulate what he'd learned to my sister, you could see a real disconnection. For him, the future would be shell scripts, hacks and the Internet.

          Lately, though, those vague feelings have sol

          • Interesting thoughts.

            I'm not sure of what I think really. My gut feeling is that, despite all the changes, we'll move on. Things will change, yet they will stay the same. We'll eliminate one need to have another take it's place. We'll find an answer only to have another one opened up.

            And you know what - there's so much with technology we could do now, but there's just not enough time/resources/money for individuals. Given the freedom and the money I could wire my home to make it a house that most peo
  • How many times have I had this conversation? "Hey what's that new son--" Song is already playing off my computer, having downloaded already.

    [almost]Anytime I want to know something, I can look it up online, thanks to IMDb, allmusic.com, google, etc. I guess that's a difference in all life, not just college. But it helps that I have an always-on 10Mbit connection.

    Another interesting story: I was taking a music class and one student who didn't have a computer and lived off campus handed in the first
    • I agree, computers have revolutionized the college experience in so many ways. I took my computer to a store to be fixed and didn't have it for 24 hours and I felt lost. It's good that we have such technologies to make things easier but it's sad how dependent we are on them.
  • What college did you go to?

    >There wasn't online gaming to lure you away from
    >your studies for hours at a time.

    Riiight...So you weren't cool enough to get invited to play Empire (http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/empire/faq/). Or a MUD. Okay. At my school, you could tell who was playing because they'd all head for their PC or a terminal once an hour, every hour, if they'd even left the terminal at all.

    Well, instead you could have been playing dorm-wide games of Strategic Conquest (over homebuilt PhoneN
    • I'm pretty sure XENIX was scrapped in the early 80's (82 or 83 i think) and I think it ran on x86 boxes.

      Apple did have A/UX (i think thats how it was spelled) which was a unix that runs on some of the 68k based macs. I think A/UX provided access to the finder, so you could have GUI vs command line goodness arguments.

      • No, XENIX on the Lisa predates A/UX by several years. Google it, there's some Lisa fanatics out there whose pages mention it.

        You could get XENIX only for the Lisa, too, that's why students had to get one instead of the cheaper Mac Plus. Not sure why. I had some surplus Mac XL conversion kits (this is all coming back to me) that I bought at a MacWorld and sold at a huge profit on campus. Once someone converted their Lisa to a Mac XL, they couldn't run XENIX anymore. As I recall.

      • Speaking of A/UX, my Dad (an old AT&T guy) is still running this today on a Mac IIci. It's freaky to watch. He dual-boots from a Syquest cartridge. Talk about old school.
  • There are those of us who went to college before the internet and there are those of us who went after. It is hard for either group to recognize how it has changed as they were there to witness the other side of things.

    Granted, there might be a group of people from any one school that spans a 4 year period in which they witnessed both, but even their lives started to get influenced by computers and the internet prior to it actually hitting their campus.

    • I went to college from 1992 to 1996, so I was just a little early to the Internet party. My school didn't offer e-mail to all students until 1994; before then you had to pay $75/semester for access to the computer labs and a VAX e-mail account. To get access to Unix and the vastly superior PINE e-mail system, you had to fill out a special form and even then, it helped to have a buddy who worked in the lab grease the wheel for you. I was there for the early days of the Mosaic browser, but there wasn't muc

  • oddd... (Score:2)

    by XO ( 250276 )
    Funny, where I'm at, in 1988, every student that I had ever met had an id on either the Unix or VAX clusters at all the universities.

    There were TONS of Internet games.
    Internet chat was the big deal at the time.

    The Internet hasn't changed all that much, except for the advent of the WWW. Everything else that's out here fairly well existed (the WWW including the media facilities...) before then.

    Instant Messaging didn't exist, but IRC did, so that was sort of the Universal Instant Messenger (oh, and TALK.

  • Google. (Score:3)

    by Feztaa ( 633745 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @03:57PM (#6118088) Homepage
    Have computers and the internet made college life any easier in some respects?

    In my computer science courses, the prelab questions would be posted online, and after they were due, the answers were posted online.

    The answers were also in the google cache... :)
  • My girlfriend and I are the top two students in EE at a small but prominent school in Texas in 1989. She is deciding between UC Berkeley and MIT for grad school, and I am choosing between the equivalent med schools... A letter (remember paper?) from a Prof at Berkley has an email address on it (joe@ucb.edu, or something like that) I go "hey, their computer's email uses the "@" sign just like our VAX." Leave it to my girlfriend, the smart one, to say "maybe the computers are connected!"
  • The only way to find out for sure is to go back to college yourself, bro. Any one of us can tell you that it has changed, but compared to what? A student now has no way of telling what it was like back in the day, because they weren't there.

    I remember the library, too. I'd still probably use it if I went back today: I am more comfortable with citing published works as sources; your eyes don't hurt as much reading a book compared to a screen; and you never know if the guy on the web is full of crap, or craz

  • Went to college in '75 (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All the coffee houses left over from the '60s were in the process of being remodeled and turned into discos. I wanted to study microprocessors, but there was no course on them, only a course in IBM 360 assembly language taught by people who couldn't speak English. Then I looked for a course in electronics design (having built my own clocks and filters out of ICs) and you had to take a bunch of hard math first. (If certifications had existed I would have ditched college and taken some tests instead.) The
  • Let me qualify this with today being my example. I woke up and printed out the lecture notes outline for one of my classes from the internet (only available on the class homepage), which is basically required for every class. After class I went to the library to enroll in classes for the fall. This can be done in to ways. One is over the phone using a "press 1 for this, press 2 for that" menu or on the internet (guess which one i used). I also used the computer to access the course catalog since the pap
  • Instead of hacking MUD's and playing Ultima 2 on my Apple ][e, in the days I went to college, kids today are hacking games like 'Counter-Strike' and pirating music.

    Dolemite
    _______________

  • My expierence (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fish_in_the_c ( 577259 )
    well, i think i might be able to give a better insight into this topic then many because i was in college for 5 years starting in 1992 and finishing in 1997. The vast shift in technology at that time gave me a chance to actually witness the quite rise of the internet. To give an example, i remember the old z-80 terminals and green and white paper and have seen how things were done when most work in the CS department was still on the mainframe ( they were still in use when i started) but i also saw the bir
  • I attended college in 1995-97 and thus was one of the first classes that had ethernet to the dorm (iirc the university was 80% done at the time). MP3 usage was common, and got me into listening to a bunch of different music (and purchasing cds! *gasp*). It helped me pick up computers [or rather non-DOS/amiga computing] and learn networking. It helped me meet people around campus and make friends. It helped me play a perverbial shitload of quake.

    Mainly though, it was really great at distracting me. I have..

  • When I started undergrad in 1986, one of the first things they made every student do was get their computing account and password. Even then, there were plenty of professors who insisted on contact via email, and most students I knew had at least one course where a significant portion of discussion was conducted online.

    People spent incredible amounts of time on email and chat, with most people I knew checking their email from public kiosks, computing centers, or their home machines several times per day.

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