What's the Skinny?

I can't recall how our floor newsletter came to be called "What's the Skinny?" My roommates and I coordinated the collection of the newsletter information, compiled it, and produced a professional looking newsletter. I remember putting the issues together, using an old version of PageMaker on Macintosh computers hidden away in a dark room in the bottom of Anspach Hall on Central Michigan University's campus, but I don't remember printing all the information from everyone's room. It was quite an undertaking ... and provides pretty interesting reading 15 or so years later.

I imagine the college experience today is quite different from mine, just 15 years ago. We had a small computer lab in Larzelere Hall. During the fall of 1990, we had to use large floppy disks to boot up computers in order to use WordPerfect. But, when we arrived back to school in January, we had brand new computers in the lab — and they had hard drives that actually stored programs so we no longer had to load them. We could write our papers or whatever we were working on and save them onto small floppy disks.

My senior year, 1994, a roommate had a computer and he would sometimes drag a 50 foot phone cord to the telephone and use the phone to connect with the world in a non–phonely manner ... Of course, every time he did this, the phone would be busy for anyone trying to call ... Now, halls are wireless and I don't even know if they have telephones since everyone owns a cell phone. Classes are online now. Certainly, much communication is done electronically. Blackboard controls how classes are run, too. And, you know what, none of this is unusual to today's college students. It's a matter of course.