Remembering the Nightmarish Rite That Was UT Registration (Slideshow)

A UT student registering for classesBack in the stone age, before the World Wide Web and even before the TEX phone system, there was a hellish biannual rite of passage for UT students known as registration.

It was done in the hellish heat of Gregory Gym and, later, in the hellish vastness of the Erwin Center. You waited in line for a class and if when you got to the front the class was full, you had to go wait in some other line for some other class.

Course catalogs were for sale in vending machines, and you actually had to flip through it to find a class — there was no Control-F feature. Few UT experiences were so soul-crushing.

To commemorate the students returning to campus this week, we dug into the archives to uncover some scenes from those nightmarish times of decades past.

Today’s students couldn’t possibly imagine. Ah, you hyper-digital 19-year-olds, it must have been rough for you to register from your iPhone while on vacation in the Bahamas.

Were you forced to wait in these interminable lines? Did it make you tougher? Is that you in the short shorts?

 
 
 

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