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0 pointssseagull4y ago0 comments

Similar experience (as a user) at a medium-sized college.

The information system (class registration, bursar, etc) could be accessed via a TUI over telnet/ssh. It was amazingly fast, and all the older professors could move around that thing fast as hell, since all the shortcuts were in muscle memory. Force-adding a student to a class could literally take <5s if they had all the numbers.

Students could use it, too. And those of us who knew about it would do so, since it was so much better.

Then the web frontend came out…

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megous4y ago

Hehe, we also had similar system in university. It was usually accessed over telnet, but in some places at the school, you could still find the real electron tube green (or orange?) text teletype terminal, where the student could sit and access just this system.

It was fast in normal times, but you'd still have trouble using it when the class registrations opened, and thousands of students tried to use it at the same time.

toast04y ago

> It was fast in normal times, but you'd still have trouble using it when the class registrations opened, and thousands of students tried to use it at the same time.

Often the way these things work, the old terminals go slow (sometimes very slow) but work, and the new way times out often making it impossible to make changes, but sometimes you still can, but won't know if they worked.

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