[mdb333]

sorta related: I remember first day of CS101 class circa 1998... professor starts off with question, "why are you here? why are you all here?"

After going around and replying "no" to a half dozen or so different individuals with increasingly philosophical responses he broke it down for us with, "you're all here because 60k! You're going to graduate with a computer science degree and make 60k a year!"

to even imagine that was supposed to be an inspiring number back then is pretty laughable. I was already making as much doing chinsy web dev stuff.

It was a different time for sure. There were no (or very few) laptops, you took notes on paper, you went to the computer labs to do work (with old sparcstations and such) or you remoted in to your shell and used emacs and gdb. Pretty simple times.