College Looks Fun

Parents Forum
1

<p>I'm pretty old. Things have really changed over the years. This time for the better.</p>

<p>I've had a chance to look over the materials that my S's future college put online for many of their classes. I wish we had had access to those kind of resources when I was in school. Syllabi, lecture notes, exercises, homework, old tests, even pdfs of textbooks. I'm geeky enough that I would have devoured these things even before class started and come full of questions.</p>

<p>We were lucky to get access to some memographed notes. I'm jealous.</p>

2

<p>Remember how we had to TYPE all of our term papers? I can still smell the white out. :)</p>

3

<p>Yes. That usually took longer than writing the paper in the first place.</p>

<p>Don't forget chalkboards or cleaning erasers, either. :lol</p>

4

<p>carolyn -</p>

<p>I couldn't resist. Your message about the white-out IMMEDIATELY put the following Weird Al rap parody into my head (with the line about white-out all over the screen). BTW, this is a very good video!</p>

<p>IT'S ALL ABOUT THE PENTIUMS
by "Weird Al" Yankovic</p>

<p>(parody of "It's All About the Benjamins," by Puff Daddy, Rob Zombie, Dave Grohl, Biggy Smalls, Lil Kim, Mase, and the guitarist from Silverchair)</p>

<p>(It's all about the Pentiums, baby)
(It's all about the Pentiums! It's all about the Pentiums!)</p>

<p>Whatcha wanna do? Wannabe hackers? Code crackers? Slackers?
Wastin' time with all the chat room yackers?
Nine-to-five, chillin' at Hewlett-Packard?
Workin' at a desk with a dumb little placard?
Yeah, payin' the bills with my mad programming skills
Defraggin' my hard drive just for thrills
I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM
I never feed trolls and I don't read spam
Installed a T1 line at my house
Always at my PC, double-clickin' on my mouse!
Upgrade my system at least twice a day
I'm strictly plug-and-play; I ain't afraid of Y2k!
I'm down with Bill Gates; I call him "Money" for short
I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support</p>

<p>(It's all about the Pentiums, what!)</p>

<p>You gotta be the dumbest newbie I've ever seen
You've got white-out all over your screen
You think your Commodore 64 is really neato
What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?
You're usin' a 386, don't make me laugh
Your Windows boots up in, what, a day and a half?
You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette
You're the biggest joke on the Internet
Your database is a disaster
You're waxin' your modem, tryin' to make it go faster
Hey fella, I bet you're still livin' in your parents' cellar
Downloadin' pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar
And postin' "Me too!" like some brain-dead AOLer
I should do the world a favor and cap you like old Yeller
You're just about as useless as JPGs to Helen Keller</p>

<p>(It's all about the Pentiums!)
(It's all about the Pentiums!)
(It's all about the Pentiums!)
(It's all about the Pentiums!)</p>

<p>Whatcha wanna do? Wannabe hackers? Code crackers? Slackers?
Wastin' time with all the chat room yackers?
Nine-to-five, chillin' at Hewlett-Packard?</p>

<p>Wanna run with my crew, huh?
Rule cyberspace and crunch numbers like I do?
They call me the king of the spreadsheets
I got 'em all printed out on my bedsheets
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop over a week
Throw away that junk, man, it's an antique
Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great...
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
My digital media is write-protected
I beta-tested every operating system
Gave props to some, and others I dissed 'em
while you're computer's crashin', mine's multitaskin'
Got a flat-screen monitor 40 inches wide
I beleive that yours says Etcha-sketch on the side
In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user
You've got your own newsgroup:
Alt.Total-Loser
Your motherboard melts when you try to send a fax
Where'd you get your CPU, in a box of Cracker Jacks?
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you
If I ever meet you, I'll Ctl-Alt-Delete you
What!</p>

<p>It's all about the Pentiums!
It's all about the Pentiums!
It's all about the Pentiums!
It's all about the Pentiums!</p>

<p>Whatcha wanna do? Wannabe hackers? Code crackers? Slackers?
Wastin' time with all the chat room yackers?
Nine-to-five, chillin' at Hewlett-Packard?
What!</p>

5

<p>Dig,
Now that's one of Weird Al's songs that my son hasn't forced me to listen to. I do get a kick out of Weird Al though --- too bad my son is now moving on to other types of music and doesn't listen to him as much as he used to.</p>

6

<p>I just noticed that my CC user name appears in there (digital media, shortened to digmedia).</p>

7

<p>I first used a PC in my first job after law school (I worked for a cheapskate who realized he could save on adminstrative help if all the attorneys had PC's), and was astounded to think how much easier the previous three years would have been with a computer.</p>

<p>On the other hand, I suspect none of today's college students can say their freshman orientation was sponsored by a brewery.</p>

8

<p>carolyn - and remember when it was only "girls" who could type? I'm dating myself, but I did spend nights (all night) typing for my beloved BF, who was a procrastinator. And, in those days, we weren't allowed in each other's dorms at night, so we hung out all night at MIT's student center (neither of us went there). Where were Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem when I needed them?</p>

<p>Remember "corrasable" typing paper? I think that came even before white-out.</p>

9

<p>My college computer science course was all about punch cards.</p>

10

<p>I knew women in law school who had refused to learn to type to avoid being given that role. (This proved to be a poor long-term strategy with the arrival of the computer.)</p>

<p>My father made the professional journey from factory worker to white-collar mid-manager; his first step away from the factory floor was a secretarial job. In view of his example, I was anxious to learn to type.</p>

<p>(My favorite piece of trivia - "White-out" was invented by the mother of Michael Naismith of the Monkees, a former secretary who became very wealthy as a result.)</p>

11

<p>I refused to learn to type because my grandmother and greataunt always admonished me that I would always be able to find a job if I could type ( I can keyboard pretty good though)</p>

<p>My hsuband is a factory worker, and I got my first computer about 15 years ago when he was required to use it at his job and he hated them.
I am now on my 5th computer but he still hates them and uses them as little as possible. He was offered a job as a manager but turned it down because he is happy building, not managing.</p>

<p>( Bette Nesmith Graham died when she was only 56. I hope it wasn't from the fumes!)</p>

12

<p>yes, firefly - don't know whether you qualify for the "getting old" thread, but this one is beginning to resemble it. </p>

<p>I remember when "doing something on the computer" meant punching a stack of cards, taking them to a service desk in the bowels of some building, turning them over to someone geekier than I, and then coming back some other day to get the results ( a bulky prinout that you could turn into a banner to wrap around the whole building).</p>

13

<p>we got our first computer in 1988, so i was five. i remember it being the coolest thing, running MS DOS off of a 3 1/2 inch floppy.. n o hard drives.. afte ra few years of having it my parents let me have it in my room, and it was just so cool, i was like the only second or third grader to have my own computer in my room, lol. we had that computer till November 13, 1995 when we purchased a new computer (digital equipment corporation.. anyone remember them?).. and that's when we started replacing our computers left and right and upgrading and whatnot.</p>

<p>I do remmeber typewriters though, and the pencil-like thingy that you had to use to "erase" and "backspace".. that was awful :)</p>

14

<p>I actually made a good deal of money typing papers for people in college.</p>

15

<p>
[quote]
My college computer science course was all about punch cards.

[/quote]

OK, I am about to date myself: in college I carried around rolls of ... (wait for it...)</p>

<p>PUNCHED PAPER TAPE. Punch cards only came later. (And you'd darn well better have sequence-numbered them in case of droppage.) I was a whiz at making drum cards.</p>

<p>And carbon paper when you were typing? And how jealous I was of people who had <em>ELECTRIC</em> typewriters in college? And those $400 calculators, on which you could do your statistics homework!</p>

<p>And how about the ozone-y smell of the Gestetner machine making copies in the A/V room in high school?</p>

<p>We're havin' some fun now, ain't we! :D</p>

16

<p>Umm... What's a Gestetner machine?</p>

<p>Is more required in a paper, now, though? Because they are so much easier to actually write?</p>

<p>I think all my life, or at least as long as I can remember, we've had a computer. My mom did lab/data research for a library. But I don't think I really started using a computer until I was about ten.</p>

<p>Heh... now we have five good ones, one for each person in the family... and another few old ones if I count my dad's "experimental" system--he likes to play with linux...</p>

17

<p>How Mrs Nesmith invented white out: She was a secretary who hated re-typing with white tape... and one day, while she was painting her nails, she got a great idea...</p>

18

<p>The sad thing is, if Mrs. Nesmith had been working today, she would be likely to have signed an agreement granting in advance all rights to her great idea to her employer.</p>

19

<p>JMMom, I was once told that I "typed very well for a man."</p>

<p>As for dating yourself, that's one of the safer social options these days.</p>

20

<p>I recall going to the computer lab late evenings, waiting anxiously for printouts. One wrong comma and then a redo! Bribed the CS guys with food to help.
Absolutely loved my first apple with 1 mg.
Oh dear, no wonder my S cringed as I showed him punch cards. I sound like such an oldie, "In my day, walked 6 miles to school".</p>

<p>In terms of typing, I became expert of cut and paste. such artistic endeavors</p>