back in the late-80s, universities all over canada made a massive investment in converting their paper registration systems - which usually required the student to walk from faculty to faculty and have them hand-approved by the department - to touchtone telephone registration.
this was a massive bureaucratic improvement in many ways. a server with hundreds of phone lines handled the tens of thousands of students calling during registration week.
it also meant that adding and removing courses required a certain....... facility with what basically amounts to a verb-object scripting language.
both because of the dialtone scripting language, and server errors, most students, including myself, loathed calling in to register for courses. 😆
i found this "sample worksheet" from 1996 buried in the waybackmachine. if you were a post-2000s student, it should give you a sense for the 90s.
circa 2003, the telephone registration system was replaced with an online registration system.