back to the future

Imagine the following scenario: You have an important group project due next week. You need to talk to your group mates so you can split the workload and agree on what each one of you needs to do. You pick up the phone to call one of them but he isn’t home. Then you call another, but she can’t meet you on the only day you’re free… this is not what you had in mind.Never mind, you think to yourself, you can start off by doing some work on your own, so you hit the library to search for the bibliography you need. After 3 hours looking for relevant information, you invest a further 3 hours writing out notes by hand.When you finally meet up with your fellow group mates, it turns out that one of them has decided to exactly the same part of the project as you! In the end, you decide to swap your work so you can work on improving it together, but when you reach home and open his notebook, you don’t understand his handwriting. You call him but again he isn’t home. It just looks like a problem that won’t stop growing!If you’re struggling to imagine all this, it’s probably because we’re in 2015 and we have things like the Internet and smartphones to rely on. However, situations like the above were pretty common for students in the 1980s.