Blast from the past no. 1

From the "things you find when you're looking for something else" files! I didn't know I still had this thing, but I was excited to find it because, simple and primitive though it is, I couldn't reconstruct it now if my life depended on it.

Well I recall -- I hate admitting this -- the major brain contortion that this assignment required of me in 1981. This is an information retrieval program. Part of the library science degree. It assigns search terms to a list of (entirely fictitious) journals, and lets a library customer find them by topic.

I got an A, I'll have you know. I wrote in a provision for the searcher to use a search term not found. And I looped it so the searcher didn't have to re-log-in to do another search. Why is that impressive? Because my super-smart friend Eve, who was the class star, got an A-minus for having it log off after each search.

This was the one and only time I did anything better than Eve did. Yes, I still remember that!