<p>Hey, duncanidaho, off topic, but I love your screen name!</p>
<p>I took a class in IBM Assembly Language, but the school had only Univac. We had to punch up the cards and have the instructor to bring it to her work to run. After graduation, we deal with System 3 punch cards which is square and small, I miss those mainframe punch cards…</p>
<p>intparent – thank you very much. 25 years on line and you run out of ideas after awhile, but some things are too much fun to give up. I think my Bulletin Board was via a C64 with a blazing 100 baud modem (may have been 300?) somewhere in the mid 80’s.</p>
<p>We used to make Christmas wreaths with the punch cards my dad brought home from work, and chains from some kind of long metallic paper with holes. And drawing pads were the paper he brought home, you just ignored the whole punched all over.</p>
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<p>LOL.</p>
<p>D, in her second year, no less, “You’d think they’d just send a mass text.”</p>
<p>I had jobs in HS and college writing software. I wrote in assembly language, FORTRAN (with punch cards), Basic, apl, and my favorite, b. b was derived from bcpl (Berkeley Computer Programming Language, I think) and was the predecessor of c (and c++). I think this may have been on the original Unix machine at Bell Labs. I also remember JCL on IBM mainframes (really obnoxious IIRC) and I happily bailed to Apple with the first Macintoshes.</p>
<p>I bought Blackberries for both kids so that they could get the mid-day emails saying, “Could you please come to a meeting at 3?” that you wouldn’t otherwise get if you weren’t lugging your laptop with you.</p>
<p>I text with ShawD but ShawSon tends to email.</p>
<p>Just show them an old Remington and they’ll stop complaining.</p>
<p>^^^ What complaining? My son’s entire dorm was outfitted with new Tempurpedic mattresses, there are chocolate fountains for study breaks, and he shares a bathroom with only 3 other suite-mates.</p>
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<p>Uh-oh…busted!</p>
<p>I"m remembering the landline in the room and whiteboard on the door method of communication. With no answering machine or caller id to even know who called or who you missed.</p>
<p>^ me, too. And some of my friends were impressed that each dorm room at my school had it’s own phone line!</p>
<p>^ In my S’s dorm, each room has a land line. But no one uses them - everyone has cell phones.</p>
<p>I am thinking I’m going to have to get S a smart phone. He was emailing me the other day from his laptop from the laundry room. ;)</p>
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<p>High Point U ??</p>
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<p>I think there was a phone at the end of the floor with a notepad, bulletin board, and tacks. ANswer the phone, take a note and tack it up, or scream down the hall for the intended if it was an emergency (incoming and local calls only), Pay Phone on the 1st floor to call out usually collect.</p>
<p>As a true new-millenium helicopter parent, I am eternally grateful that the days of the single pay-phone on the hall and snail mail as primary communication are long gone. Now I can annoy my kids 24/7 via text. ;)</p>
<p>I don’t really know how they focus or get anything done with their cell phones buzzing with texts every 30 seconds and Facebook hiding in the window behind the paper they’re typing. D told me that she goes to the library to do her work, it’s less distracting than being in her dorm room. She gave me that bit of information while she was talking to me on her cell phone, as she was walking to the library. 15 minutes later I sent her a FB message and within 90 seconds she had responded. So there aren’t any distractions in the library, huh?..</p>
<p>^ I do notice that my S is posting pretty regularly to his Facebook. Not that I mind, since I can know what he’s up to without bugging him. He must have a window open while he’s doing his other things. As long as he’s doing the other things…</p>
<p>Loved the FORTRAN punch card memories…or, come to think of it, maybe because it still amazes me that my jump drive holds WAY more info than my first desktop. Splurged on that for a whole 128MB on the hard drive…I was one of the first teachers on staff at that school to have a PC! I’ve always been grateful that I was bascially pushed into taking FORTRAN…not because I could ever master the prgramming, but because of the flowcharting logic thought process and because I had to get comfy with a computer as the desktop industry was in infancy!</p>
<p>My students are making comments like “get over it Dad its a jump drive”, in response to my generation’s amazement of how far things have come!!! I’m sure our parents had similar experiences…</p>
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<p>I kid you not, several of my syllabi so far have mentioned “If you’re not checking your email every two hours, you WILL fall behind.” Honestly, college is the only reason I upgraded to a Blackberry; I don’t text people and rarely even call anyone, but if I didn’t have something that gave me my email instantaneously and let me check the course websites online, I would probably have failed most of my classes now. Several of my professors expect us to check our email less than 10 minutes before class begins.</p>
<p>My daughter doesn’t “check” email, it just pops up on her phone, which is never more than a few inches away from her body, if not actually in her hand at all times.</p>
<p>I’m against all this massive emailing by profs. S2 had a terrible time with it last year. I was amazed how often they changed assignments, test times, test dates, etc., and often at the last minute. Didn’t seem right to me. I don’t think they’d accept this going the other way. Also makes it difficult for a kid with a job and/or no smartphone.</p>
<p>OTOH, I’m with Lafalum84, I do like being able to contact my kids whenever necessary. S2 is great about rapid response, even if only “k”. S1 responds when he thinks necessary, which is at best 10%, even when it is an urgent question in need of an answer. Annoying.</p>
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We fortunately only had to use punch cards for one semester, then our school went to terminals on a time-share system.</p>
<p>We quickly learned, though, to draw a diagonal line on our cards decks, just in case.</p>