@Merch I didn’t know where to post this, so I made a new topic… may be a quick one.
There was a podcast recently where you read out some questions from LRA members and you read one from @Gna2r. you read it like you didn’t know where that came from. Did UVa go away from the 5-character student/network designators for each student? Mine was bcz7g… and I still remember many of my friends’ ones to this day despite graduating in 2000 as our e-mail addresses were tied to this.
As an IT guy… I’m assuming this construct went away once UVa migrated from the e-mail system from when I was there (Acorn was the system if I remember correctly?) to Microsoft Exchange like the rest of the world.
I just found it funny that when you read out the username, you had no idea where it came from. I guess it shows how old I am.
The current system is randomly assigned six-letter/number computing IDs (for example, wvb7js). Until 2018 the first three letters would be your first, middle, and last initials, but they changed them to be totally random in 2018.
It’s amazing how terrible UVA and everyone else used to be with personal information. I also had the network ID with my initials, and I seem to remember Social Security numbers being used for more school-related stuff than was ever necessary. Should have been randomly generating stuff from the start!
I’m not sure the initials on your network ID were that bad… to be honest it was a bit weird that it wasn’t first.last for your e-mail… but hey, back then my dad had a Compuserve e-mail address which was just a string of 7 or 8 numbers @compuserve.com…
I do remember a lot of SSN stuff… but that was also when there was NO cyber/PII security at all… UVa was not an anomaly… it was more the norm world-wide.
Up until around 2005… Promotion lists in the Air Force were published with everyone’s SSN after their name… LOL! So that was the government being oblivious.
Thanks for the heads up @jazznutUVA. I was assigned that ID when I arrived in 2000 as you were heading out Hey @Merch why are you gonna hate on my initials
UVA straight up printed thousands of our social security numbers in those snail mail pamphlets when I was in school. Don’t worry though they gave us one year of free credit monitoring.
8s here. I always had to clarify that it wasn’t 85 unless you knew it was supposed to be a number and a letter.
Georgetown used initials and numbers. I was 27 there. I think 27, but not positive. I remember my UVa alias much better than my decade more recent Georgetown one.
Easiest class I took at UVA was a CS class that E School students weren’t allowed to take.
It was probably fall semester 2000. We learned about email, Microsoft Office, and websites.
Assignments would be things like sending the professor an email with a Word document attached that had at least three types of different formatting in the document.
We had to make a website on the UVA server for our final assignment in the class.
Hey 