SomeGuy Wrote:So, what were your late teen college years like? Personally speaking?
Mostly school, work, and hanging out with my friends who had moved out at 18 (I didn't leave until the advanced age of 21). We would drink beer, smoke bowls and listen to tunes. I knew a couple of guys with thousand album collections and they would make mix-tapes for me. Nowadays everyone can get just about any tune on the internet. But back then it took some doing to get huge collections.
A number of my buds were youngest sons with GI parents and older siblings/cousins. Sometimes we talked about how we had missed it all, unlike those 10 years older who were able to go Woodstock and do all the Sixties stuff. Of course, we missed Vietnam, so maybe it was just as well
We saw ourselves as a different generation than they.
I was also into programming. My dad was really interested in computers, so he built a terminal using a 300 baud modem with acoustic coupler to dial into the public school system time-sharing system (Dad was a shop teacher). We learned BASIC together. Then he got into assembler and my brother and I tried to write a text dungeon game with 16 K to work with. I might have gone into computers, but when I took Fortran in summer 1978 I found they were still using Hollerith cards, which turned me off.
I had had a lab in the basement when I was in junior high, and so had an interest in chemistry, which led to me majoring in chem. I ended up with a Ph.D. in Chem E. after research I did for a writing assignment my senior college year showed me this was a better way to go career-wise. I also played D&D. I was a total nerd--still am.