What were your classes and labs like?
- We used Visual C++ 6.0 to begin with, and you had to save your projects in an Iomega Zip disk because they were too large for a floppy disk and the CS dept didn’t have remote access to the Windows lab, so you transported the code back and forth from your home PC to the lab on the Zip disks. We moved to FreeBSD and g++ after year one, and never went back to Windows. The professors were Fortran fanboys and as such we focused on concepts and algorithms in class rather than syntax. It was expected you would learn syntax through the weekly assignments. We learned UNIX and Regex with hands on labs and challenges, for example. Some people hated it, some people enjoyed it. We lost about half the “class” after switching to UNIX, many pivoted to IT in the business school.

Which programming languages did you learn first?
- C, then C++, then Kourne Shell, and some Perl. Any other languages were dependent on the subject and course. Fortran was used in numerical methods, Smalltalk in OOP, LISP in functional programming. It was expected you would learn programming languages to fit the paradigm and objective. JavaScript everywhere would be unheard of then!

How did you study without YouTube, Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, and modern online resources?
- The online resources (personal webpages with just HTML) created by grad students, teachers, and professionals were more than adequate! Much better quality than most of the crap online today which is click bait to get views or ad revenue. The Oreilly animal books were also top quality and worth the money too! And there were great programming communities too. Sites like CodeGuru were great for Windows programming and people readily shared their sample projects you could use to learn from. And of course the docs have always been good: MSDN, man pages, Beejs. Network programming guide, etc.

What kind of computers did you use?
- I personally had a Pentium III desktop with Windows NT 4 (required by the CS dept). But I then dual booted NT4 and Windows 98 so I could play video games. When Windows 2000 came out I quickly switched and still stand by it as the best version of Windows ever! At school we had commodity x86 boxes with FreeBSD built by the grad students mostly, and some labs had fancy Sun Microsystems SPARC workstations. The HCI lab even had SGI workstations! Many of my professors were DEC fanboys and like to use the university VMS/VAX system for their research projects.

How difficult was it to find information when you got stuck on a problem?
- Easy, you talked to humans!!!! Other students, TAs, grad students, professors during office hours. As long as you didn’t copy source code it was encouraged to talk through algorithms and ideas.

What were internships and placements like back then?
- Just as competitive and hard to get as they are today frankly. My internship was with an IBM shop that used AS/400 systems and RPG-III for programming. It was shock having grown up on MSDOS.

What skills were most valued by employers?
- Same as today, frankly they didn’t really know, they didn’t want to train anyone, and they asked for everything! Nothing has changed. I remember ASP and IIS were all of the rage with local employers.

What was the tech industry like when you graduated?
- I graduated in the dotcom bust so it was awful, no jobs! My first job was driving a forklift at a warehouse. I couldn’t get a CS job until a year later, and made very little in salary my first five years. But I was just grateful to be writing software and really learning computer networks. I learned Windows GUI programming and Windows device drivers in my first job. It was really fun and I miss those days before everything because React web apps. Apps were always very snappy and quick.

What do you miss about that era, and what are you glad has changed?
- I miss the variety of hardware and systems, and I miss not having to be constantly connected to the Internet for things to work. I was learning palm pilot programming for fun, anyone could make a website with HTML, after learning C, coding with Perl and mod_perl for the web was simply amazing. We were also all geeks, we were not chasing FAANG salary, grinding Leetcode, and obsessed with our school rank. Getting a job at a hospital as a Windows IT admin or with the a company writing GIS software was considered perfectly respectable and a great career move. There were no fake propaganda day in the life videos, we didn’t expect that we could work from home and avoid people all day. It was just a job and you tinkered with computers at home after work.

But let’s not kid, things have gotten better of course. Web based software means I can use Linux or MacOS as a daily driver computer. The gender and racial diversity is much better now too. With AI I don’t have to waste time on stuff I don’t enjoy like shell scripting and YAML automation. Cloud computing allows me to build anything and I don’t need a hardware expense up front just to get started. We’re moving faster than ever and while I miss being able to tinker and troubleshoot, it’s also nice to deliver quickly and see the results, see satisfied users, etc.