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Rutgers-Camden Students Get Peek At What It Took For World To Go Digital

CAMDEN, NJ (CBS) -- Technology changes so quickly these days. We tend to discard computers, cell phones and more almost routinely for the latest stuff. A symposium at Rutgers-Camden gave several dozen participants a chance to go back in time, when the digital age was just dawning.

The day-long session Friday was called R-CADE -- short for Rutgers Camden Archive of Digital Ephemera. Associate Professor Jim Brown runs the Digital Studies Center and says this was a chance for students to have fun and learn about the history of digital media.

"So instead of looking at these artifacts like game systems or old Commodore 64 computers or 3-D printers, we want people to take them apart, repurpose them, make them into art objects, dismantle them, all in the interest of kind of deep research of the objects themselves," Brown told KYW Newsradio.

And yes, the young people get it. One student just rebuilt an old Apple II computer as a class project. "He had to buy a new power supply from eBay and get this thing up and running," Brown added, "but he also did some research on how the machine worked."

Students had a chance to show off their work and research, and tap into the knowledge of some of those who helped to usher in the digital world as we now know it.

Click here for more information on the event:

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