A Periodic Tale of Departmental Lore (Part 2)
Written by David Lapakko
Surprise, surprise–not that long ago, communication technology was quite different in our department and on this campus. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, we had this amazing piece of machinery called a VHS player. With it, we could see instructional videos in class and record student presentations–how cool was that? But, this equipment had to be housed somewhere. 171 Foss, which is now a suite for the offices of our department faculty, was Augsburg’s A/V headquarters for many years. If you wanted to show a video in class, you needed to reserve a cart–a tall, gangly thing that had a large TV monitor on the top shelf and a VHS player on the shelf underneath. These top-heavy metal behemoths were on wheels, and there were perhaps a dozen of them.
Throughout the day, you’d see A/V student workers pushing these carts all over campus to classrooms where they had been reserved. It didn’t matter if there was a blizzard or a thunderstorm; someone had to push them through the snow, across the streets, and over the curbs. And, you counted yourself as fortunate to get one, because sometimes they were all in use in particular time slots. Back then, if you wanted to record student presentations, you could go to the library and check out a camera. But there were not things like mp4s, or online links, so if students wanted to see what they had done, they needed to get the VHS tape and find a place to play it.
In the meantime, technology was revolutionizing faculty offices. Throughout most of the 20th century, students would have to be very lucky to contact their professors. They could try them during their posted office hours, or they could phone them, but if the person wasn’t in, they were pretty much sunk. But then, along came voicemail! Now we could leave recorded messages for faculty and staff, 24/7. Especially in the early ‘90s, voicemail was all the rage; my goodness, you could program the phone to include all the phone extensions in your department, and send them all a group voicemail message. Now, of course, we would send such a note via email, but that wasn’t an option back then. Still, we felt quite privileged to have such state of the art equipment–including overhead projectors in every classroom!
Next time: When “working adults” roamed around campus by the hundreds–the glorious era
of Weekend College.