At the weekend I rummaged through old boxes, including two boxes in which I had stored my university documents. True to the motto of the student three-way competition “Copy, punch, file”, there were several folders with copies of articles and entire books that could not be borrowed, but which were urgently needed for homework. I also found mock forms, today I enter the grades for my students directly into a system.
The most exciting relic from my student days, however, is the punch card seen in the photo above. No, I didn’t program with punch cards anymore, but I still saw the old punch card calculators, and I had them explain to me how exactly it worked with punching the programs into the punch cards, hence this one punch card. The gentleman in the computer center, who told me everything, had shining eyes when he told me about the old equipment, which was gradually dismantled to make way for terminals for the students. Terminals, not PCs
In the first semester, there was already an e-mail address on request with justification and stamp from the professor… as well as access to the WWW a short time later, if you had a reason for it. There were still typewriters in the library for typing papers, and books were searched for on microfiche, not with a computer (fortunately, this had improved during my studies).
Why am I telling you all this? Because you only appreciate what you are working with today when you know it differently