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That mindset thing again

I’ve mentioned that the Software Engineering course I’m TA for starts off by reading Brooks. The book is, for the most part, thirty years old, and shows its age in many ways. Mostly, the problem is technical details; the core principles still hold.

We asked students to pull out five terms they didn’t understand, and provide definitions. A lot of them were expected, but a few have taken me by surprise.

One of them: microfiche. If you’re my age, you remember hours in the library (libraries) doing literature research on microfiche, but for today’s undergrads, that’s apparently such ancient history they don’t even know the term.

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Posted by pjm on September 21, 2006 7:01 PM |

Comments

I remember having to do that. In, um, elementary school, where I just randomly chose 5 words to pretend I didn’t understand. (I once chose ‘bygones’.)

I’m jealous of them. I don’t like microfiche.

Posted by: wolfa | September 21, 2006 8:00 PM

OK, outdated technologies that I used: punch cards, nixie tubes, 120 film, 45 rpm records, 8 track tape, and on and on.

Posted by: Scooter | September 21, 2006 10:00 PM

It’s not that I’m surprised it’s outdated; PDFs are an obvious replacement, and since storage space was the issue, optical disks take vastly less space than the fiche. I’m just surprised at the rapidity of it. It’s not much more than ten years ago that I was dragging out New York Review of Books articles out on microfilm in the basement of Frost for my senior thesis, and these kids have never heard of the stuff. At least they’ve heard of rotary phones (my parents didn’t go to all push-button phones until I’d gone off to college.)

Posted by: pjm | September 21, 2006 10:15 PM

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