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Comment by technothrasher | Hacker News Reader

> the only undergrad on my corridor who had a workstation in the dorm room

In 1993, I worked my way up to becoming the lab manager for the residential computer lab in my dorm (basically a bunch of Macs for people to use, as we were the dorm farthest away from the library's undergrad computing center). I did that so I could put my SGI Indigo XS24 directly onto the 10Base2 Ethernet, rather than connecting it via the university's phone system in my room using PPP at 57kbps.

I went back for a reunion about five years ago and the lab was still running (although in a different dorm now). I talked to the kid running it, who was nice enough, but he said nobody used the lab really, and he didn't know the first thing about networking. He was a gamer who "wanted to learn more about Linux". I tried to keep an open mind, times have changed, and he was eager, but boy was it depressing that the old culture is long dead.

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As someone who has taught university courses recently, I’ve noticed that more colleges and universities are abandoning computer labs due to the ubiquity of affordable laptops, where many students are well-served by a cheap Chromebook or a used ThinkPad. I understand the costs of operating a lab, but I think we’ve lost a few things with the demise of the computer lab, from having a standardized environment in which students can run required software tools (many of my Cal Poly professors had a rule that all programming assignment submissions must compile and run on their servers running Solaris, solving the “it worked on my machine” problem), to the social experiences of being in a lab. I have fond memories of my times in the CS department’s lab at Cal Poly during the latter half of the 2000s.

> the social experiences of being in a lab.

Not sure, if I miss that. I read about hacker culture and such, but my own limited experience of the early nineties of the labs of a large university weren't all that romantic.

I recall that some more experienced users poked fun at newbies (who didn't know of xauth) by making their workstation bloke like a sheep. While that was fun, there was no other interaction, quiet, anonymous and uninviting like a library reading room.

Once me and a team mate shared a whole lab with only one third guy. My mate had a cold which he neglected and during the session passed out, hitting his head hard on the desk. I had to shout at the third guy to solicit his help. He seemed to be content hacking on his terminal and let my mate die as long as he'd be quiet about it.

In the same lab (might have been the same session earlier, I don't recall) one fellow not being member of my team ran `crashme` on the shared server (pre-Solaris SunOS, iirc). He apologized with the words (paraphrasing) "I didn't expect it would actually crash" when the server in fact did. We were not amused.

Mid nineties the labs got deserted as most everyone was working from home.

Had a great lab experience in the early 2000's, loads of people helping each other, sharing ideas, the odd practical joke but nothing nasty. Labs were always busy too. Dual booting Solaris and NT4 PCs, plus an embedded device for assembly class. We also had free use of the ancient dot matrix printer with continuous holed paper... I still have some code listings somewhere in a drawer. I miss those days sometimes, working remotely.

>professors had a rule that all programming assignment submissions must compile and run on their servers running Solaris

This is what made me learn Linux, my universities comp sci also ran Solaris and required the assignments run under that environment. This was in early 2000's I hated the university computer labs they were full of Sun Hardware they all ran CDE desktop environment which I thought was ugly as all sin (it looked incredibly dated by 2000's).

Someone in my class told me about SSH and that you could work from home. He gave me a stack of burnt cd's (with Mandrake - an old Linux distribution, which ran KDE) I was able to remotely work on my assignments from comfort of my home and I've been a Linux user ever since.

Any other Cal Poly folks around? Always seems like we're underrepresented compared to the Stanfords of the world.

I wasn't even a CS grad (I tried to but CP wouldn't let me switch from physics, one of their less endearing policies) but being there in 2001, 2002 was a really cool time. I remember when the email went down and my roommate commented "just SSH* in and use Pine" and for some reason something clicked right then - "oh yeah, you can do a whole lot more without the browser than with one". I feel like that mindset was there when I was doing a coding exercise for a job a few years back and figured it made sense to just open a socket with netcat instead of building a whole REST API - it was fun (if non-robust!)

I vaguely recall systems meant to help automatically register you for classes as soon as they became available, and even used their touch-tone based class reg system at one point.

Anyway, ramblings. I ended up with a physics degree and going in to tech anyway; I wish they had just let me switch.

* Hell, it might even have just been telnet. This was back when you could browse all your dormmate's media libraries and we shared freely, even unsecured wifi was common for a few years.

Labs were the hallway of building 20(MIT) of learning. Since I had a decade on most of the students, I would help out. I learned so much from others questions, and I am sure they learned a lot from me. Collobtative environments are the best.

I got X11 the hard way, with a stack of floppies, but had a great guide, and lots of help. Thanks Barry. I ran X on everything.

I was the student manager of all Unix systems on campus in the late 90s. Included labs of Sun and HP workstations. Managed some system connected to various lab instruments around campus, too. We stood up the first Linux lab around 1998, but most students preferred the Solaris workstations. People were just starting to put their own Linux systems on the dorm networks. It was still pretty rare for most students to even have computers in their dorm at the time.

Even supported the last remaining VAX because no one else dared dig into the wall of manuals to figure out how it worked.

Was a fun time.

Very similar to my experience! By the time I was a senior in '94, I was the student employee for the University Computing Center's Unix group and had to run around fixing all the workstations on campus and spent a lot of time administrating the various departments multi-user servers. Didn't touch the VMS machines though, there was a different group for that. I don't believe they had a student employee.

When I was a student I did find myself longing for a kind of cozy computer lab experience but it was basically impossible.

I consider myself as part of the one of tbe last generation where people had to use a computer (e.g. I remember windows XP and even older somewhat vividly but never owned a non-smart phone) and even then I was sat next to people who could barely type so could never really do anything without being taken out of the zone.

The culture does exist but the average is so mediocre/disinterested that they don't bother (there's no reason to) "going" to the computer anymore. I think that's slightly sad in, nerds are much more social than most people realise.

Thinking about it I did get a little bit of that experience at school in that I learnt a lot of the basics of programming by playing with compiler explorer in the back of my computing and D&T lessons.

When I was an undergrad, the Linux and Mac computer labs were always empty since no one knew how to use them. It was great during end of semester, since all the Windows labs were crammed with desperate students trying to finish their papers, you knew that there was always computers available in those labs.

I remember the same thing at Sacramento City College around 2003-05 when I was taking classes as a high school student. It was hard to reserve a PC in the library running Windows XP; sometimes there were long lines. However, the Macs in the library running Mac OS 9 were usually available. Because I grew up on System 7 in elementary school, I had no problem using Mac OS 9. In addition, the graphics communication department had a lab open to all students whenever no classes were using the lab. That lab had dozens of Power Mac G4s running Mac OS X Jaguar. That was my favorite lab on campus. But once I started taking computer science classes, we had exclusive access to labs running Windows XP that were stocked with development tools such as Visual Studio.

After high school I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where the CS department highly encouraged the use of Unix, whether it was Solaris on servers, Linux on desktops, and Mac OS X, “bougie Unix” for those who could afford MacBooks. Most CS students at Cal Poly only used Windows for games and for non-CS courses that required Windows-only software tools.

We had a cluster of about 8 X-terminals which were connected to a HP-UX box of some sort at my university. My "running Linux since 10th grade" ass had a fast-pass when everyone else had to queue on one side of the hall for a Windows machine or the other for an OS 9 Macintosh

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