In June of 1963, we were "recognized" and squirted out onto the world's currents, a directionless cloud, the coral spawn of the post war 'forties. Where would life's currents take us and where would we newly pelagic alight?
One of those currents floated many of us up to UVic, which, at that moment, wasn't Victoria College but wasn't UVic yet. UVic rejected "UniVic" ("Too close to Univac" decreed the Powers) and other names and settled upon UVic while we watched in that first year.
Now Univac brings to mind the ordeal of registration. On line computing in real time let alone remote terminals were far off. The System 360 was hatching but it was for batching. Networked desk tops hadn't even been thought of. Computer core memory literally was still cores threaded onto wires. (By the way, are you aware that the space shuttle still uses [2004] core memory? Yes. One of the many challenges of keeping the S.T.S. going all these years has been finding somebody to make antique memory planes for it. A further complication is size. The program for operating the vehicle cannot be held in memory because the memory is tiny. The program has to be split up into phases of the vehicle's operation. When one phase is complete, the next phase has to be loaded in and this, mark you, from a tape recorder! Shades of the 'sixties.)
Back to registration; it was a long process, an all morning or all afternoon process, and one computer nerds these days would characterize as repetitive iteration. One would go all through the run around of registering for a course only to determine that the only section that did not conflict with other classes on one's schedule was for one of the then newly instituted 08:30 lectures in that subject. Ok, back to the other courses and reregister for a couple of less desirable sections in those courses to make room for a non 08:30 lecture in the last course only to go back to registering for that last course to discover that all the sections in that course were now full except for exactly that damned 08:30 lecture that you had been trying to avoid!
Ok, so accept the now inevitable and register for the 08:30 lecture and then go back and get back into the good sections of the other courses, right? Wrong. By now there were no places left in those good sections. After hours of labour, the naïve ended up with a timetable that was a scattered mess.
