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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 affo

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.

ForOldHack 2y ago
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.
bigger_cheese 2y ago
>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.
guenthert 2y ago
> 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.
- entropyie 2y ago
  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.
CalRobert 2y ago
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.

ForOldHack 2y ago

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.

bigger_cheese 2y ago

>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.

guenthert 2y ago

> 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.

entropyie 2y ago
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.

CalRobert 2y ago

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.