Back when I was in college in the mid to late 90s, you walked to class uphill both ways in the driving snow barefoot. OK, the barefoot and uphill part is made up, but I was in Syracuse, NY, so you bet the snow part was way true.
And if you wanted get a paper done, you had two options. The first was to go to the computer cluster and work there, provided you could get an open computer. These were located in dorms, in the student center, and in certain academic buildings. You knew these specific locations the same way you knew which blocks to hit if you wanted Mario to get extra lives.
The other option was to have your own computer, which I didn’t, or have a roommate who was kind enough to let you borrow his, which I did.
And that was that. If you worked on a paper at home, you saved the Word doc to a floppy disk that actually wasn’t floppy, carted it to a computer cluster, and then printed it there.
Now a days, everybody’s got laptops they slip in and out of their backpacks without a second thought. Very few people had laptops back in my day, when “social media” was how you might refer to MTV. (Plus the laptops were the size of Chevy Impalas) If you want to print now, you log on to PawPrints, the campus printing network, then choose if you want one or two sided or if you want color or black and white. Then you pick which printer on campus you happen to be near, and voila! It’s printed and you can go about your day.
I’m used to it now, having repeated the above process what seems like a hundred times, but this summer in IMS I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I leave you with a quote from Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
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