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Comment by covercash | Hacker News Reader

For my high school senior theology project, we were instructed to select a modern news event, categorize it into one (or more) of the seven deadly sins, and then give a class presentation. I miraculously convinced my group to choose the Microsoft antitrust case since I had just read the Wired cover story on it. Throughout the year, I sat in the back of the room and had a fake bible cover over my Flash 5 Bible and was reading about actionscript instead of paying attention to a topic I had no interest in. For the project, I made a fully interactive Windows 2000 desktop and functioning start menu that would launch “programs” that were the visual components of the presentation. We had the teacher move class to the computer lab where I loaded the flash executable onto each computer so the students could play with it while we gave the oral presentation. It was pretty awesome and we ended up with the only A in the entire grade!

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... and this is the reason we can’t have nice things. Source: In 8th grade our class had to do a book report ‘project’. I selected an ebook on intro to processing (it’s an environment build on Java that lets you create graphics applications easily). I wrote an application that drove a (self built) 6-wheel drive robot wirelessly around our school for the project.

Needless to say, there’s was little literary analysis done, but the class enjoyed the wireless video stream.

Future me came to get annoyed by overachievers that raised the bar for ‘A’ grades.

Overachievers should not be able to raise the bar. If they can, then the system is broken. Grades should be relative to the course content, not the abilities of the students.

When I started university, it was clear that I had much more experience programming than the other students, but I had to do certain introductory classes anyway because there was no way to receive credit for half a decade of self learning. On one assignment my lecturer went looking for things to mark me down on that were outside the scope of the assignment because "it would look suspicious if you got a perfect grade".

Some people are just capable of more than is expected of that class for whatever reason, not because they intend to demoralise everyone else and break the system.

Similar story when I was at college (UK meaning) (late 90s).

Final project was an inventory system for a company.

Mine was a RDBMS backed system that implemented proper stock control with parent/child SKU handling etc (I went to the library and checked out books on inventory control) and was fully documented (180 pages of documentation) and a full user manual with a FAQ.

I thought that was what professional programmers did...man was I in for a shock when I hit industry.

I started at a junior college and then transferred to a four-year University. There was a time when I was going to University where I was still backfilling some course credits to complete my Associates degree from my work at the junior college.

The respective school catalogs deemed some courses at one school to be equivalent to courses at the other school without really having them reexamined on a regular basis. As a result, one of the courses (Statistics?) that I needed to complete my Associate's degree requirements translated to a much simpler course equivalent at the University.

After the first day of class, the teacher came up to me and asked me, "what the heck are you doing here?" because he could tell from my interactions in class that I was already beyond the material of the course. I explained to him the situation, and he offered to come up with some sort of a challenge exam for which he would just give me full credit for the course. instead, I served as a kind of a de facto T.A. for about half time for the rest of the course.

I did intro to programming as part of a degree as a mature-aged student and the only way to get a good mark was to do an "extra project" that the professor would sign off on. I wanted to make a GUI RSS reader with the ability to email links from things to people, that wasn't interesting/challenging enough in a class where we were learning about functions and loops. I gave up and took the not-perfect mark, quit the degree because their entire system was ridiculous, and haven't missed it.

To be fair, I needed an A on that project in order to get a B in the class for the year because my grades on tests/quizzes weren’t great due to my focus on computers.

which sin was it?? greed would be the obvious, but one could make a case for pride and sloth as well.

Primarily greed but I think one of my group members also mentioned pride and gluttony. This was 18 years ago so details are fuzzy. I probably have the project on an old hard drive or CD-R somewhere...

CD-R: there's a word I hadn't heard for a long time. It's amazing how technology marches forward and you only notice it when you look back.

There’s a chance it’s also on a Zip disk somewhere in my basement!

Oh wow, Zip disks! I entirely forgot those existed. Which is now bringing back memories of just how many different disk drives those late 90s computers would have. The desktops in my middle school would have floppy, zip, sometimes another floppy, and an optical/cd drive. Towers are now almost flat in front, with even optical CD/DVD drives disappearing in many corners, but back in the day there were disk bays everywhere.

I can still feel the satisfying click as a floppy was seated home and hear the buzz as the drive spun up. There was something wonderfully concrete about those storage media. You just don't get the same satisfaction at all from plugging in a USB stick. And the hours spent pulling back the metal cover and letting it go while bored in class...

Although I do think they stuck around a little longer than many remember. I was still using 3.5s to bring papers to home and back around 1998-2000.

I'll add MO discs. They were supposedly more durable, longer-lasting, and (at one point) GB than CD's and DVD's. I discovered them playing Resident Evil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive

I also had a drive for 100MB, Zip disks. Only ever owned one since I couldn't justify the expense. Hardly anyone else had them. What's point of a tech for moving data if you can't use it to share the data with friends and local businesses? ;)

While on the (off-) topic of magneto-optical drives, do you remember how every cyberpunk film of the 1990s seemed to feature (MO) MiniDiscs as ‘future’ storage? I remember them appearing in some form or another in Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, and The Matrix (amongst others). Lawnmower Man featured CD drives in external caddies, a type of drive system that virtually disappeared with the advent of ‘2x” CD-ROM drives starting sometime in 1992 or 1993.

My first USB ‘thumbrive’ was a 16MB IBM-branded unit I received as an amazing gift in December 2001, when the world was still in shock over the 9/11 attacks.

God, the memories...

It didn't hurt that MO drives were big and colourful, which translates well to the screen :)

Anyone for Jaz drives? Oh man, I remember my mom having 100MB Zip drives and 1GB Jaz drives for a while in the 90s. Always wanted an excuse to play around with them but didn't have much useful data to put on them at that point.

I had an internal 2GB Jaz SCSI unit in my April of 1999 dual-PIII-450 “God Box” I was given for my 18th birthday.

Oh man no kidding! Dual P3s... those things were absolute beasts at the time. What video card did you have? I remember the ol 266 celeron to 400 overclock that became popular around then. Researching that was what got me originally into overclocking.

And now even hard drives and their associated bays are disappearing (good riddance) as flash storage becomes increasingly prevalent in the form of SSD M.2 slots. Most functionality that was on expansion cards is now either redundant (sound cards, disk controllers) or integrated somehow onto the motherboard/chipset/processor (networking, integrated graphics, video in/out capabilities built into USB and HDMI ports)...

Very true. And to be clear, I much prefer the advent of solid-state based storage; I will be truly happy to never again have a HDD show up DOA. Or to hear an ominous crunch while working on something, and then realize the drive's just decided now is a good time to go bye-bye. I completely welcome the loss of moving parts.

But like I said, there was just something to the experience of working with diskettes. It felt more analog somehow.

I wonder if there was any such nostalgia for the days of tape/cassette storage.

> Or to hear an ominous crunch while working on something, and then realize the drive's just decided now is a good time to go bye-bye. I completely welcome the loss of moving parts.

"Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18653728

You don't need moving parts for the drive to go bye-bye without warning.

Somewhere, in some box, I may yet have a disc with my first BASIC programs from high school.

On floppy disc.

On eight inch floppy disc. (DEC PDP 11/04)

I didn't keep the mark sense cards. I think.

Vic 20’s crappy cassette tapes are probably why I became a network admin instead of a programmer: 9 times out of 10 the cassettes never actaully saved my hours long programming sessions.

Using GOTOs.

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