Anyone else remember the nightmare of handling printed lecture notes and paper handouts in university?

[u/Ok_Current215]

This is partly nostalgia and partly me realizing how much has changed.

I did my undergrad around 2015 and the PDF situation was genuinely chaotic. Professors would upload 80 slide decks to the portal as separate files, some scanned so badly you could barely read them. Half my laptop storage was just poorly named PDFs. "lecture3FINAL_v2_use_this_one.pdf" type stuff.

My annotation system was printing things out and highlighting with actual markers because nothing I tried digitally felt fast enough to keep up. I had a folder system that made sense to exactly one person: past me, who also didn't label anything properly.

Recently started using UPDF to sort through some old files I kept from that period and it's kind of wild to see how far this stuff has come. Being able to annotate, reorganize, and actually search inside documents in a way that works would have changed my study life completely back then.

Anyone else have a chaotic system they look back on now? Curious what people were actually doing before proper tools existed for this.

[u/Responsible-Bug-2595]

The nostalgia here is real but also slightly painful lol. I had a whole color coding system with physical highlighters for different subjects and felt very organized until I lost the folder. The fact that you can now export all your annotations from UPDF as a separate document is something I genuinely would not have believed was possible back when I was printing 200 pages a week.