The new university year rolls around and it’s been 15 years since I began my postgraduate journey (with a few years off here and there not studying). So in honour of what seems like a fairly momentous anniversary for me here a quick class snap and a link to some from my fourth year computer science class back in 1989.
Raymond Wilson, Neil Sharman, Colin Daniels, Tim Wilson, Clinton Logan
Greg Davidson, Simon Glass, Craig Nevill-Manning, Stephen Garner
Computer Science Honours & First-year Masters Class, University of Canterbury, 1989
Full archive at: Nevill-Manning Photo Album: “Canterbury University: Computer Science, 1989”
It was a pretty brutal year as I remember it with stacks of pressure and work covering courses on geographic information systems, computer graphics, data encryption, data compression, computer networking and database theory (relational alegra & calculus) to name a few. (Kim was doing Operations Research postgrad at the same time and they worked pretty hard too).
As you can see there were no women in the class so it had the whole monastic type feel (plus a lack of balance). Kim was the only woman in her year in OPRE.
The Internet was pretty much unknown out there in the “real world” but we used Usenet, e-mail & FTP (gopher, archie, WAIS and WWW weren’t really there yet) and computers with a mouse were still a novelty outside of Apple Macs and Sun Workstations.
It was around here that my love affair with UNIX began and now I can run a UNIX-based Mac OS on my iBook I’ve pretty much reached heaven on earth.
The pictures give a quick view into life in the Honours room but it looks like most of them were taken at night. Ah, those were the days when youthful vigor (and caffeinated soft drinks) allowed all night coding.
