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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Just out of curiosity, how old are you/when did you attend college? I ask because "back in the day" everyone knew.

If you were a cs student in 1995, you pretty much had to work in one of the basement labs. One of the profs liked to come to the lab at 3am before a deadline and laugh at us.

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I was CS from 88-91 and everyone knew since we were either in the basement of one building or lab in another. Plus, everyone knew if you were online if you had the cash to be logged in from home. The joys of classes taught on an IBM 370 or VAX.

The social aspects of the old labs made for many memories and lessons.

I started my CS degree in 95, and did most of my coursework from my dorm, telnetting in to one of the Sparcs we were expected to write code on, eventually using X11 forwarding too. Wasn't any different resultswise than sitting with everyone else at terminals in the lab, though I guess I missed out on the social aspects of plowing through assignments in the same room together.

Yeah technically you could telnet in or do a remote X11, but you'd have to telnet to one of the machines in the lab, that someone was working on. So their processes would get priority since they were on the console, and sometimes people were asses and would boot you out so they could compile faster.

Also we didn't really have many people with laptops, so if you had a group project meeting in the lab was pretty much the only way you could all get computers but still interact with each other.

The crappy thing is that while this might be "back in the day", I still have to spend time cooped up in computer lab because software companies make the licenses way too expensive so we have nowhere else to do our homework.

My alma mater offered RDP for those programs.

I'm attending right now

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