How did people write University assignments before computers??!!

[ufkacbln]

I remember one set of case studies we had to present.... all stored on my Amstrad PCW.

With the 9 dot matrix printer and 4 passes for high quality print a page took ages. I often used to set it to print, go to work and still find it chugging away when I got back in the evening!

 

[TVC]

Mine were handwritten then passed to a typist who had one of those new fangled word processor things. I can't remember but she probably charged 20p/100 words, and kept the text on a floppy so you could change it later or have more copies made. Note, it was HER floppy and so you had to go back to her if you wanted anything updating (good business model I think).

 

[beanzontoast]

I typed my 2 postgrad dissertations myself on a typewriter bought for the purpose - in the process becoming a better typist!

 

[Ranger]

I was shocked last year when someone I worked with (a student) was looking at the lecture notes on the internet for a class she had missed

Apparently, the uni (well respected, established establishment) now require lecturers to upload all their lecture slides and notes to the sites to allow students to access them. When I was at Uni you missed a lecture at your peril and had to rely on someone else's notes to bring you up to speed

Edited to allow me to download spelling checker!

 

[dellzeqq]

No laptops for taking notes on during lectures when I was at uni either. If you got a lecturer who crammed in loads of detail and went at the speed of light with explanations, you needed either shorthand or to be able to precis like a demon to keep up.

It was always amusing to see people stopping to shake their wrists half way though a particularly long lecture.

they take laptops in to lectures these days!!!!!!!!!!! Say it ain't so!!!

 

[Amheirchion]

I did last year, it was a good way of saving paper, and allowing me to order all my notes efficiently.
This year though I'm on a different course, and the lectures don't seem to lend themselves to it as well, so it's back to pen and paper.

 

[atbman]

It were bookin' time on t' kiln for my clay tablets as were t'real bottleneck. You 'ad to 'ave real muscles to be a librarian in them days. It were switch t' papyrus as started rot.

 

[XmisterIS]

I was recently asked, completely seriously, by a 19 year old, how we ever managed to have a decent social life at university without mobile phones!

I think it's the same issue as with the the OP. If something doesn't exist you don't know you haven't got it, and so just get on with life using the tools you do have. You don't feel hard done by, and you can't miss things that haven't been invented yet.

That's true ... I can't imagine life without computers!!!!!

That being said, I am plenty old enough to remember the days before mobile phones - I remember telling my young cousin that when I went out cross-country biking as a teenager we didn't have mobiles because they were incredibly expensive and coverage wasn't great. (He was incredulous!) Mind you, in retrospect, there was something really exciting about going out in a group, miles from anywhere, with no means of contacting anyone - it made the whole experience seem truly wild and when we got home it felt like we'd been on a proper adventure.

 

[beanzontoast]

they take laptops in to lectures these days!!!!!!!!!!! Say it ain't so!!!

I have seen it on the televisualentertainmentdevice so it must be true!

 

[Dan B]

Back in the early 90s, my college at Oxford had a computer room, but it was inhabited mainly by scary-looking (and smelling) physics and engineeering postgrads, so you rarely went in there. We wrote all our essays by hand (one 10-20 A4 side piece every two weeks, at least, for each course you were doing), and then the tutor would savage them and make you rewrite them after the tutorial!

Which college? If it was St Johns, I was one of them[*] :-) Mind you, as I recall it the computer room was mostly inhabited by the SWSS who wanted to abuse the free printing facilities to produce 200 copies of an advert for whatever meeting/demo/march they were trying to promote (photocopying cost money, printing didn't)

[*] well, sorta. Actually undergrad, but definitely engineering. Have to add though that most of the smell was from people eating kebabs and it wasn't nearly as bad as the TV room in that respect

 

[Black Sheep]

Dad wrote it, mum typed it and they didn't even go to the same uni!

 

[Banjo]

A friend of mine in his 40s did a philosophy degree. He was totally skint at the time living on an old boat moored to a muddy river bank commuting into Cardiff Uni on a rusty mtb.

He wrote his essays on yellowing A4 paper in the damp cabin of the boat with light from an oil lamp.

I couldnt help thinking of the other students tapping away on laptops etc in centrally heated houses.

Lost touch with him unfortunately as he was one of lifes real characters.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Which college? If it was St Johns, I was one of them[*] :-)

Not as posh! St. Anne's...

 

[porteous]

I did a BA years ago in the 70s. Essays were hand written and the dissertation had to be typed. I feel sorry for anybody who had to decypher my handwriting!

Last month I finished a Masters at Birmingham. Everything had to be "just so", double spaced, correct margins, etc etc. And electronic submission which was always traumatic, especially the dissertation when we all found out the electronic submission system would not take "word" documents of 20k words! ( For some of us that had never dealt with pdf files this was a real pain!)

As a result I think there is now an unpleasant emphasis on how good your IT and keyboard skills are, perhaps at the expense of marking good ideas.

 

[User482]

It's amazing how quickly it changed. In my first year (1996) all of my assignments were hand written, yet I don't think anyone hand wrote their dissertations by the time I left in '99. I remember that our lecturers were always on at us to make better use of the web as a research aid. I wonder if they still feel the same way?