College students actually built their own system very similar to Facebook using AOL Instant Messenger as a platform starting in the late 90s. The away message took the place of the status update, and the user profile was where people posted their schedule, inspirational quotes, and the emo kids would post song lyrics that meant something to them.

This of course required leaving a computer powered on and connected to the Internet 24/7, and the only demographic that could really do that consistently were college students living in dorm rooms.

This was not really even that long ago. Most universities actually advised their students against buying laptops in the late 90s/early 00s. The quote was always something along the lines of "Desktop computers are more powerful and a better value for your money, and are less likely to be stolen." The idea was that a laptop was somewhat of an impractical luxury at the time. Laptops had limited utility anyway since only a select number of universities had wireless Internet access, and even the schools that did have it had relatively spotty coverage. Even if you had a laptop, it may or may not have had a wireless card in it. So computers stayed parked on desks.

All across the country, hundreds of thousands of desktop computers were sitting on desks in dorm rooms, fully powered on, running AOL Instant Messenger 24 hours a day 7 days a week so that everyone could see what their friends were up to.

Facebook essentially moved this "service" people hosted on their desktop computers to the cloud.

I'd bet money that the college students of today don't even realize this is how we did it a decade ago.

The textbooks used for this class really need to give better examples however. I understand the point is that we should focus on the process, and not the actual project, it is still kind of silly.

A tutorial for Microsoft Project 2007 suggests a small CPA firm I work for wants to network its 5 computers with a budget of 50,000 dollars, and a time limit of 6 months. I actually laughed out loud when I read this.

First of all, the book has a copyright date of 2009. This isn't an old book. There are no small businesses who are not networked at this point. Even at minimum, every small business in America has some haphazard network connecting all their machines to a cable modem or something to get out on the Internet.

The whole thing could be done in literally hours cowboy style, and if done properly with structured cabling (as opposed to holes bashed in walls and random patch cables run room to room), documentation, backups, etc , it wouldn't take more than a few days.

So yes, it's all about the project management process, but they really could have chosen a project that has more realistic costs and timeline. This isn't doing any of the non-technical people in the class any favors.