No, the old meters didn't "work fine". 1/5 of them are broken and eat your quarters, or they get jammed.

Well, in a previous job as a facebook app developer, I was using Facebook and Skype all day.

I'm looking for the guy who is supplying the dimes...

Heh, I remember that class. Instead of doing something normal, like writing a VAX assembler in C on our VAX minis running UNIX, the Professor From Hell insisted that we use a buggy Modula-2 compiler to write assembler/linkers which outputted 8086 machine code.

The class was divided into sets of 2 teams, compiler and linker. The linker teams wrote linker loaders which took the output from their assembler team, and outputted base64 text files, which would be transfered by sneaker net to PCs running DOS, at that point you were supposed to convert the base64 files to binary, and presto, they would run on the PCs.

I don't believe a single team in my class got their project to work. And now I think I know who you are too...