Monday, January 17, 2011

Pop Quiz

In my day, every class was identified by a number.  The digits to the left of the dot identified the course number, such as mathematics or chemistry, while the digits to the right identified the individual classes.Who can tell me the names of the classes?  I'll give you a freebie - drop cards are what students used to drop a class that they later decided they didn't want to take.  The deadline was usually six weeks after the semester started, which was long enough to have taken at least one exam and turned in a couple of problem sets.

To my credit, I think there was only one class I actually dropped - a class on computer programming offered by Course 6 (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, you plebes).  Let's just say that Fortran and I were not the best of friends.  There were three levels of Hell that had to be traversed in order to reach Success - 1. The program had to compile; 2. Once it compiled, it had to run; and 3. Once it ran, it had to give you the correct answer.  This was the equivalent of running an obstacle course that's like a game of snakes and ladders.  I didn't have that kind of patience...
I'll post more on computers at a later date.

1 comment:

  1. Looks like class of 1974 to me. Didn't your official Fortran Coloring Book teach you all you needed to know? Still have mine around somewhere.

    I had one 2.01 (Structures offered by MechE) professor who decided we needed to learn programming. He handed each of us a stack of already-coded Fortran punch cards -- with strict instructions to keep them in order -- and told us to run the batch overnight, then pick up the printout and turn it in. Didn't learn anything except how to submit a card batch, which itself became useless when the Computing Center went to interactive terminals the next year or so.

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