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.