SheLikesPurple made me feel old today writing about the technology from her college days.
I registered for classes by standing in line at the registrar’s window for an hour! If you couldn’t get one of your classes, you had to have an alternate ready or get back in line while you figured it out.
My freshman year if you had to write a paper, you were lucky if you had a word-processor (like this one) or a roommate with one! Else you went to the computer lab where you struggled with all of Word Perfect‘s (5.1) key stroke commands.
I was the first of any one I knew (besides my mom) who had a computer that was a tower! It had Windows 3.1, a 1 GB hard drive (yes that’s 1 GIG!), and a CD ROM. It also had a modem, so I could dial in to the campus system and check my email. It was fancy! And I even had a color inkjet printer.
Only Computer Science majors used email my first couple years of college. (I was one of them) I did email without a Windows Application. I think it was done by connecting to a big machine called a VAX machine!
My senior year of college, Sarah and I borrowed a cell phone from someone she knew (or maybe it was his brother or something) for driving to Florida for Spring Break. (no one we knew well had a phone!) It was huge and had an antenna that attached to the roof of the car and it cost about $50 for about 10 – 1 minute calls on the trip down!
I’m 34. Seriously! I’m sure someone else can top all these!
Blog, Jane! Blog! 
I’m 28, and I think the VAX system at my college was still around for the first 2 years I was in college! I never used it, though, because my class was the first one to get laptops with modems and internet in our rooms! WOO! My college was small, so we didn’t have online registration or anything, we had to do the ‘waiting in line’ thing which SUCKED SO BAD. So yeah, I can relate 🙂 Kids these days don’t know how good they have it! heehee
I’m 30 and we had to go to the computer labs too. And there was no such thing as high-speed internet. And our email was through a non-Windows application. It was called Pine or something.
I had a computer and it had Word Perfect on it. And I also used a dot matrix printer for all my papers.
And no one I knew in college had a cell phone. I didn’t get one until 1999, after I graduated.
Well, when I first started in 2003 we had the phone system and the internet. They finally discontinued the phone systems a few years later, but I used it simply because the other 22,000 people all used the internet at the same time and crashed the servers… sigh. This past year they improved the internet site with a new one and I had to learn it for my last semester… that was ridiculous.
So I never did the wait in line thing, except in high school, but I heard about it from an old teacher (50 year old now). hehe