Slashdot Asks: Do You Remember Your High School's 'Computer Room'? (gatesnotes.com) 192
Bill Gates' blog has been updated with short videos about his upcoming book, including one about how his school ended up with an ASR-33 teletype that could connect their Seattle classroom to a computer in California. "The teachers faded away pretty quickly," Gates adds, "But about six of us stayed hardcore. One was Paul Allen..." — the future co-founder of Microsoft. And the experience clearly meant a lot to Gates. "Microsoft just never would've happened without Paul — and this teletype room."
In a longer post thanking his "brilliant" teachers, Gates calls his teletype experience "an encounter that would shape my entire future" and "opened up a whole new world for me." Gates also thanks World War II Navy pilot and Boeing engineer Bill Dougall, who "was instrumental in bringing computer access to our school, something he and other faculty members pushed for after taking a summer computer class... The fascinating thing about Mr. Dougall was that he didn't actually know much about programming; he exhausted his knowledge within a week. But he had the vision to know it was important and the trust to let us students figure it out."
Gates shared a similar memory about the computer-room's 20-something overseer Fred Wright, who "intuitively understood that the best way to get students to learn was to let us explore on our own terms. There was no sign-up sheet, no locked door, no formal instruction." Instead, Mr. Wright let us figure things out ourselves and trusted that, without his guidance, we'd have to get creative... Some of the other teachers argued for tighter regulations, worried about what we might be doing in there unsupervised. But even though Mr. Wright occasionally popped in to break up a squabble or listen as someone explained their latest program, for the most part he defended our autonomy...
Mr. Wright gave us something invaluable: the space to discover our own potential.
Any Slashdot readers have a similarly impactful experience? Share your own thoughts and memories in the comments.
Do you remember your high school's computer room?
In a longer post thanking his "brilliant" teachers, Gates calls his teletype experience "an encounter that would shape my entire future" and "opened up a whole new world for me." Gates also thanks World War II Navy pilot and Boeing engineer Bill Dougall, who "was instrumental in bringing computer access to our school, something he and other faculty members pushed for after taking a summer computer class... The fascinating thing about Mr. Dougall was that he didn't actually know much about programming; he exhausted his knowledge within a week. But he had the vision to know it was important and the trust to let us students figure it out."
Gates shared a similar memory about the computer-room's 20-something overseer Fred Wright, who "intuitively understood that the best way to get students to learn was to let us explore on our own terms. There was no sign-up sheet, no locked door, no formal instruction." Instead, Mr. Wright let us figure things out ourselves and trusted that, without his guidance, we'd have to get creative... Some of the other teachers argued for tighter regulations, worried about what we might be doing in there unsupervised. But even though Mr. Wright occasionally popped in to break up a squabble or listen as someone explained their latest program, for the most part he defended our autonomy...
Mr. Wright gave us something invaluable: the space to discover our own potential.
Any Slashdot readers have a similarly impactful experience? Share your own thoughts and memories in the comments.
Do you remember your high school's computer room?
Science X Science Class (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure! (Score:2)
We used an abacus back then
Re: (Score:3)
So you went to a fancy school then. We just counted on our fingers...
Re:Sure! (Score:5, Funny)
The Four Programmers Sketch
(Four old programmers sit reminiscing about the "good old days" of coding.)
Programmer 1: Aye, kids these days have it easy. Writing in Python, JavaScript—high-level languages that do everything for ‘em. Back in my day, we had to write in C!
Programmer 2: C? You were lucky! We had to code in assembly—punching in opcodes by hand!
Programmer 3: Assembly? Luxury! We only had ones and zeroes, flipping switches on the front panel to program each instruction!
Programmer 4: Ones and zeroes? Pfft. We only had zeroes! And we were grateful for ‘em!
Re: (Score:3)
If you fast long enough, the bugs will just die. Intermittent fasting works too, but only if the bug is also intermittent.
Re: (Score:2)
Fingers? Pure luxury! After walking to school uphill both ways in howling winds, blowing rain and freezing weather in nothing but shorts, we learnt maths counting the swats to the back of our heads with a cricket bat and those of us still conscious had to thank the teacher afterwards. And we endured all that without ever even seeing a mobile phone or social media. Kids today!
Actually going to primary school in shorts in all weathers in Yorkshire was a real thing since i
Re: (Score:2)
All we had to play with was fire.
Fire:
https://pictures.abebooks.com/... [abebooks.com]
Re: (Score:2)
All we had to play with was fire.
You had Fire? Luxury! :-)
Re: (Score:2)
We used an abacus back then
True story: when I was in high school (this was the UK, so it was a Grammar School then), we used a local college's computer.
The way we used it was that we marked cards with pencil to write a Fortran program, the cards would be taken to the college, where they would be scanned and punched according to the pencil markings, then run and a week later, we would receive the cards back with any printouts that resulted.
We didn't have a computer room (Score:5, Informative)
High schools didn't start having computer rooms until sometime in the later half of the 1980s.
Now get off my lawn...
Re: (Score:3)
A little earlier for ours. In 1983 we had a room off the library that had IIRC qty2 of Apple ][e and qty 4 or 5 of Apple ][+. I spent a LOT of time in that room...
Re: (Score:2)
Mine had one in ~1982.
Re: (Score:2)
1982, we had 8 x apple 2 plus and I had a teacher that was always asking me questions.
I bought that summer my C-64 and my dislike of apple just kept growing.
I don't have that many happy memories of that class because I had to learn to code on my own and never got the mental gift of coding to see how far I could push myself. Also the other 2 guys that enjoyed coding were always bullied by others, so I being somewhat bigger, working class, and fought my brother growing up, got into fights looking out for my g
Re:We didn't have a computer room (Score:4, Interesting)
In one of our math classes I did write a short program in Fortran which got entered into punch cards and run. I guess our computer "room" was off campus somewhere.
Re: (Score:2)
Same with me: slide rules and numeric tables in physics and math classes. Hand-held calculators were only just starting to become available and they were very expensive. One of the teachers had an HP-35.
As for actual computers, our computer science class never saw one except on a field trip. We coded our programs on mark-sense cards (same size as punch cards) that were taken to some other place in our district that did have a computer. We'd get back the output a day later. Damn tedious debugging like that.
Re: (Score:2)
In one of our math classes I did write a short program in Fortran which got entered into punch cards and run. I guess our computer "room" was off campus somewhere.
Did you "write" the program by marking cards with pencils? See my post above.
Re:We didn't have a computer room (Score:4, Funny)
When I graduated from high school in the early 1980s we didn't have a computer room. However, there was one computer on premises. In 1981 the school bought a TRS-80, but we couldn't use it. Instead, our high school principal put it in his office behind his desk and he didn't let anyone else touch it. He did allow the AV club to take a photograph of it, and that photograph appeared in a full page of the school yearbook. It was kind of like "this is the future and you can't have it" lol.
Re: (Score:2)
IBM 1130 and APL (Score:2)
With a golfball typer console and a special print head for the APL character set.
Re: (Score:2)
I can recall the sound of that golf ball head to this day.
Re:We didn't have a computer room (Score:4, Interesting)
High schools didn't start having computer rooms until sometime in the later half of the 1980s.
Now get off my lawn...
We had a tiny computer room by the end of the 1970s. It featured a slightly bug-ridden used PDP-8 that had been donated to the school. IIRC, two people could use it at the same time: one on the CRT monitor and one using the line printer as a "display". Luckily, only about a dozen students at the school knew how to use it, because after school hours there were always several geeks in there vying to get one of the two seats.
During my last year there, they also added a couple of TRS-80s. That changed the dynamics of the computer room quite a bit, because now there were a lot more dorks crowding in to play video games.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if Gates asked any of the high school girls he visited on Epstein's island about their computer rooms.
Re: (Score:2)
My *elementary* school had a computer room in 1981. There were a couple apple ][ machines, a bunch of vic 20s, some commodore PETs and a PDP 11/15, which was more of a cool demonstration than a useful computer for 6th graders, but it was pretty frigging cool anyway and I got to play ascii space invaders on it.
I went to a tech high school for data processing so we had a PDP 11/44 that I wrote COBOL, RPG and FORTRAN on, later swapped out for an IBM System/36.
I don't have a lawn for anyone to get off of, it's
Re: (Score:2)
Funny you mention Cobol. If you still recall any of it, ( Vax or IBM 370 ), the pay rate is in excess of $ 280 an hour.
I still get calls from some fun code I did back in the late 80's to early 90's ( I documented my code exceedingly verbose and had my name and number and address. every time someone calls I ask them to update it ). I sometimes got the desire to help the coding team to improve my trading reports and issues I encountered. 30 or 40 hours later, boom, solution, after solution after solution. I w
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In Northern Virginia (Metro DC), my very-well-resourced public school district rented 3 ASR-33s with 300baud acoustic couplers, and a connection to Control Data Corporation time-sharing in _JUNIOR_ high school (7th, 8th and 9th at the time). Time-sharing BASIC and punched paper tape. I recall writing a fatuous exponential growth program about "Ben" (the rat) and how his minions would take over the city.
The math teachers had to pretend they knew more about how to work it than the kids did in no time.
The scho
Re: (Score:2)
And I failed to mention: Junior High would've been around 1973-4 for me.
Re: We didn't have a computer room (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
High schools didn't start having computer rooms until sometime in the later half of the 1980s.
My rural, somewhat impoverished high school had a maybe eight Apple II+'s and IIe's in 1985. I think it actually started a couple of years before. I find it remarkable to think we might have been ahead of the curve. The computer teacher was a former systems analyst at IBM. That sounded more impressive back then and maybe it actually was.
Re: (Score:2)
My small (13 kids in 8th grade), private grade school had a handful or so of Commodore 64's and a couple new Apple's in the mid to late 80's. Sadly, my experience was the opposite of Gates'.
Gradeschool experience got me briefly interested, but, not being one of the teachers pets, I rarely got to touch them, and never got to try the Apple's. I did my programming in a stenographers notebook (still have it). The experience turned me off of that whole group of people. It wasn't until late in college that I touc
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
High schools didn't start having computer rooms until sometime in the later half of the 1980s.
Now get off my lawn...
We had them in 1980. Anyone know what a Compucolor II was?
Re: (Score:2)
We didn't have a computer room at my high school while I was there. We did programming in 1981 for our 7th Form Applied Maths class at the Christchurch Polytechnic. It was across the road from my school and we used two PDP-11 computers. We learned to program numerical methods using BASIC. I spent many hours using them on my private projects such as printing out variable-sized banners, oblivious to the fact that the school was being charged for my usage. I was the top user in my class that year, costing them
Re: (Score:2)
The computer that we had in High School was an Olivetti 101. It was really a programable calculator with a 22 digit printout.
Re: (Score:2)
High schools didn't start having computer rooms until sometime in the later half of the 1980s.
Now get off my lawn...
We had one in the 70's, I learned Fortran on it. Granted you wrote on paper and then handed the instruction to teh next person...
Re: We didn't have a computer room (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
BBC Model Bs (Score:3)
The idiot teacher set us a simple BASIC programming task of adding two numbers together and printing the result but since I had a BBC B at home and had taught myself programming that was a something I knew how to do. However, I noticed that they had some copies of the "Advanced Usee Guide" for the
Re: (Score:2)
I graduated in '84 and my high school (in a suburb near Grand Rapids, MI) had a computer room my junior and senior years. The one in my junior year was in a windowless classroom (because the computers were so valuable, doncha know) where there were maybe a dozen or so TRS-80 Model III's with cassette drives. BUT they were also set up so the instructor could download a program from their computer to the rest simultaneously. I'm pretty sure it was literally just the audio output of their cassette drive bra
Re: (Score:2)
Mine got one in the mid 1980's. It was mostly filled with Apple II and Apple IIe computers and there was a rush to be the first kid to get the two sets of Oregon Trail disks out of the storage box.
A mainframe? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My school had a tiny allocation of time on the local university's mainframe, an ICT 1900 running GEORGE 3 [wikipedia.org]. We had a teletype with a paper tape reader and one of those big modems with rubber cups for the telephone handset to be put into.
Yep! (Score:4, Interesting)
My high school had a computer room with about half a dozen Commodore PETs. Then we got a couple of VIC-20s and the first Commodore 64 in our Canadian province.
I was a total nerd in high school and joined the computer club (and was president thereof in Grade 12.)
We mostly used to play games on the machines, but also did a bit of programming and just hanging out. We sponsored a couple of school dances and did a car wash to raise money... good times.
I ended up studying electrical engineering and then worked for 33 years in software development before retiring. I still maintain a few Free Software projects that I started... one of which [skoll.ca] was started in 1989 and is probably older than many of its users!
Re:Yep! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a little younger than you are, we did have a full room that would allow an English class to come in for typing up papers in Clarisworks on some Macintosh LC II models.
I made a little bit of pocket money selling floppy disks to classmates. Best Buy had deals where you could buy 100 1.44MB 3.5" floppies for something like $20 and then submit for a $20 mail-in rebate, seemingly no limit in the number of times one did this. Disks basically cost me just the sales tax. I was selling the for $1 each. I would usually make around $10 to $15 on English class computer lab day as almost no one came prepared with a disk. One girl balked at my prices one day, until I cordially invited her to go to the school bookstore to buy one, a 720kB 3.5" disk for something like $3.50. She promptly handed over a dollar and stopped vocally complaining, even if she was still displeased. What was surprising were the number of repeat customers, some students lost or damaged their floppy disks and had to buy new ones.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My high school had some crap PC's we could use. It was my first introduction into hacking to make those machines boot Linux instead
The "informatics" class was crap. We just got lessons on how office and Windows worked -_-'
No Computer Room In South Alabama (Score:2)
Only way to even see a computer was to enroll in vocational school classes they had in 10 grade where you would get some education on things like car repair, and cutting hair and some other stuff plus a computer class with about 20 'Trash-80's' on desks and we learned basic and other nifty monochrome magic. I kinda resented the class because I already had a Commodore 64 at home with a color monitor which smoked the Dandy Tandy's we had at school. This was in the early 80's which was about 40,000 joints ago.
This question is for young folks only (Score:3)
High schools in the 60s didn't have computers
And yes, I remember the computer room in college in the 70s
Burroughs B6700 mainframe, punch card reader, rooms full of card punching typewriter-like machines
The smaller computer lab had a mini computer. You had to input the boot program in binary, using toggle switches
You could always spot a CS student, because we carried big boxes of punch cards
I first used the Arpanet, precursor to the internet, on a teletype
Re: (Score:2)
All California state Universities had CDC 3150's. We punched cards, turned them in and an hour or two later, got the tractor feed printout of our programming results wrapped around our card deck.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, don't you drop those cards. Don't you drop that stack of punch cards! Don't drop it! DON'T!!!
Whaddareya, a virgin?
Anyone recall the "Corvus Constellation" network? (Score:3)
TI-83+: the computer room in your hand (Score:3, Interesting)
My high school didn't have a computer room. On paper, the only CS that was offered counted as a vocational class and was taught at the vocational school campus we shared with neighboring districts.
But God bless my 9th grade geometry teacher, Ms F. Graphing calculators were required equipment, and first day of class she handed out a packet of type-in programs in Ti-Basic, and announced her calculator policy for homework and in-class tests and quizes: you could use whatever you wanted on your calculator, provided that you coded it up yourself.
Pic on his web page could have been mine (Score:4, Interesting)
It was a small dead-end corridor in the science wing. Room for about 6 kids if we squeezed in. No computer, just that ASR-33 with the modem CCU. You dialed up the computer at a public high school (a timeshared PDP-8 with 8? users) and ran your FOCAL-69 programs. There were no courses yet, that happened after I changed schools in my senior year.
all of them (Score:3)
We had Apple IIs in elementary school, a couple in the library plus about 24 or 25 of them in a classroom.
We had PCjrs at my middle school, Apple 2s and 1 Mac at my Jr. High, and PCs (for typing and Autocad) and I some macs (for publishing) at my first high school, and one Mac at my second where we got on that trial of the system that would deliver a partial USENET feed to you via cable, and your replies went out via modem.
Computer what? (Score:3)
No, my high school didn't have a computer room or any computer access for students at all. This was in the early 70's. Fortunately, in 1975, CMU still had the free access PDP-8 running TSS-8 available, and it took me about 2 days to become entranced. I still have some assembly code I wrote for that machine in my freshman year.
Language Lab (Score:3)
The coolest piece of tech at my HS was this room where they had stations set up for each student, who would don headphones and listen to a language tape (I was taking French, and the other choices were Spanish and German) and recite back into a microphone, and the teacher would randomly connect, listen, and tell you how bad you were speaking. Overall, pretty useless.
Computers were "in the air" but not a thing yet.
Of course I remember (Score:3)
It was Compaq Presario models, pizza-box form factor with the riser card for the expansion bus/slots, top-end 486s (Pentiums were already out but were still pricey enough they were not common in K-12 yet) with math coprocessors. 14" monitors I believe, also from Compaq.
When we started school as freshmen the computers weren't networked, the room had been cabled and there was a 24" telecom closet at one end next to the teacher's station, but no hubs or switches. The PCs had Ethernet cards though. At some point through the year they installed some 3com gear and networked them internally in the room ostensibly for printing to the HP LaserJet 4Plus. Because they used some variant on the NE2000 chipset we quickly figured out booting to DOS from floppies to load IPX/SPX drivers, sound drivers, with games like Quake, Warcraft II, and the overhead-view original Grand Theft Auto stored in hidden directories on the hard disk drive. Later we switched to setting up one PC that was in a different room next door and still networked as the file server removing the games from the local hard disks, where the boot floppies would prompt with that CONFIG.SYS / AUTOEXEC.BAT menu system prompting for the game in particular to play, then would load all the necessary drivers, map the network drive, change directory to the hard disk of the PC where there was a reboot program stored, and then invoke the game from the mapped drive. When the gate was quit, the final line in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file would run the reboot program.
The teacher didn't care what we did so long as we got our homework done, so we spent most days playing games against each other. The school district on the other hand did, at some point they connected our telecom closet to the rest of the district network and since I think it was a hub, our traffic was not isolated to the room. One day techs from the school district IT department came in and found us playing Quake and kicked us out of the room, but since they failed to keep an eye on us I was able to go into the room next door to shut down the server PC, when they quit the games the PCs restarted, and they couldn't find any evidence of where the games were stored.
Fun times, and arguably this dabbling established what would become an IT career path.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess I should add, when I think back on my public school education, we had Apple II models in the first elementary school I attended before we moved, I think it was a mix of IIPlus and IIe, there were a mix of keyboard colors, that was used for games like Number Munchers and Oregon Trail. When we moved the new school had a lab of Apple IIGS that were networked with that Appletalk localtalk phone-net to a handful of Apple Imagewriter dot-matrix printers and ran GS/OS, so my first GUI and networking exper
Stored in Maths Teacher's Staff Room (Score:3)
My high school's Apple ][ was in the maths staff room, and we had to have the courage to knock on the door to have it wheeled to a classroom to use over lunch. No after-school use. Had to go to computer retailers for that.
A bit of a dampener.
Sperry Univac 90/30 and DECSystem-20 (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
DECSYSTEM-20 is an interesting architecture. 36 bits!
Re: (Score:2)
I was at Ramstein for a while in the mid 90s. Looking back it seems like we were pretty well equipped, had multiple labs with Windows 3.1/95 computers, DOS computers, a couple random Macs. I got a look at the network room behind one of the computer rooms one time, that was my first up-close look at rack-mounted stuff. They were using a Sun Microsystems server to host the school website and peoples' midterm projects from the HTML programming class.
A few years before that, before the internet took off, I was
No... (Score:2)
... But my junior high / middle school, yes. I had the same teacher from (6/six)th grade. He was a geek/nerd type. In elementary, he had two Apple 2 (+ and E) computers. He even had LOGO turtle connected which was rad(ical) to see it draw on a huge sheet of paper on the classroom floor. When I was a teen(ager), he taught real computer classes like typing, AppleWorks, showing dial-up BBSes over a slow modem (300?), etc. I can't find him (Mr. Mangel) online to reconnect. :(
Gates / Allen were rich kids, went to Lakeside (Score:2)
Some kids who go there turn into murderous sociopaths [seattletimes.com].
Yep (Score:2)
>"Do you remember your high school's computer room?"
Yes, although I never used it. It was an elective, and for an advanced diploma, there was only a single elective per year and for me that had to be band. High School did nothing for me in the way of computers. It was a small lab of Apple II's I think, mid 80's.
At the time, at home, I had worked odd jobs forever and bought a Tandy (TRS-80) CoCo 1, then 2, then part-time real job and bough a CoCo 3 by the time I graduated. Cool times with Microware OS
Guess I am not that old. (Score:2)
I remember the two machines with teletype in elementary school, but by high school there were a many classrooms that had computers. My drafting studio had two screens per workstation, and one was even color! IIRC they were running AutoCAD v1.2.
Not just High School (Score:2)
Had an 8-station computer lab for 1st grade in 1985, either Commodore 64 or something from Atari. Best teacher at the time named David Hein.
Upgraded for 2nd-6th grade to some donated 286's from AT&T, terrible teacher limited us to Typing Tutor.
During 7th grade got a donation of 386's with ARCNet networking, Netware 3, took over as network admin.
Expanded the network to the middle school for 8th and 9th grade.
Eventually had the entire school wired for ethernet.
In 2003 I donated enough parts to build 14 ne
Pretty primitive by today's standards (Score:2)
It was a small closet, off my 10th-grade Math classroom, just big enough for (something like or actually -- it's been awhile) two Teletype Model 33 [wikipedia.org] paper terminals with punch tape readers and one dial acoustic modem sitting between used to dial into a remote system offsite somewhere. Can't remember if we coded in BASIC or FORTRAN though. It was 1978.
Mini-computer (Score:2)
The most impressive part, though, was its impact printer. I had never seen a printer before in person and this one was FAST. I don't know what kind it was, but I think it printed ~ 5 character line
1984 (Score:2)
1984, first year installed - 10th grade - A room with about 20 Commodore 64s and a math teacher reassigned to be a BASIC programming teacher. Having been programming Z80 and 6809 Assembly for a few years by then I was so disappointed. I was so hoping for a room full of 8088 or 8086 systems but I understand that would have been very expensive at the time. At least they weren't Apples like so many of the other schools purchased.
We had a decent computer setup... (Score:2)
At my high school (early-mid 90s or so) there were rooms with Apple Macs of various sorts and also rooms with IBM PCs. We also had a 64Kbps ISDN connection (at least at one point, not sure if it was still 64Kbps when I left or not).
We also had computers in other places like the library.
So a fair bit newer than many people here with labs that had mainframe/minicomputer stuff or 8-bit micros like Apple IIs, Commodores, TRS-80s, BBCs etc.
Unisys Icon (Score:2)
Ontario has a rather unique computer, a keyboard, trackball, and various edutainment games. These included Math Maze which had the student enter math questions to defeat opponents, games in the Bartlett Saga where the players were loyalists that had to move into Canada, and a few others.
The software isn't avilable even on abandonware sites, and the system hasn't been emulated. As such, the software is technically gone forever.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't recall that. Trash80s in the late 70s and C64s in the mid 80s, with better schools transitioning to PCs as the decade ended... that I remember.
I 'played' a lot of Logo in school, drawing ever more complex things with that stupid little turtle; a scripted Etch-a-Sketch.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I had those horrible things in the late 80's when I was in elementary school. HUGE keyboard with that awful trackball. And they would crash like crazy.
What were they, Unisys Icon...that almost rings a bell.
Also had an Apple 2 in the library, that made a bit more sense.
Then in high school in the 90s we had Commodore 64s.Grade 11 I got an IBM, maybe a 386...? Windows 3.1 and a Soundblaster. HD was like 40MB...haha
Had Cakewalk software, and actually could create and record some songs. I sort of made a '2
1972 Fortran on high school teletype (Score:2)
First site; 1991 Oregon State University "The Hemp Club" used Gopher protocol.
Apple IIe and TRS-80 (Score:2)
We had small room of Apple IIe(s), maybe 4. I remember seeing it being put together wishing they had bought TRS-80s because that is what I had access to. After a while having access to two different platforms pushed me to adapt and become the original wunderkind. I started writing and selling my games and that was the beginning of a career that is still going.
The funny thing is that I've seen many of the things I dreamed of happening in computing coming true, so it's meant keeping a lot of joy attached
In 1978 (Score:2)
My high school partnered with MIT in the late 70s because of busing in Boston.
As a result, we had 16 LA 36 decwriters,, 1 VT52, and a 2 Tektronix terminals hooked up to a PDP 11/34 running RSTS/e with 128k of ram. They also had a SOL 20.
Drafting Class (Score:2)
The only computer lab in my high school was for the drafting class. 233MHz Pentium II with 64Mb RAM and 8MB S3 GPUs.
We used them to play Unreal Tournament in 1999.
Yep (Score:2)
First time I had computer summer camp at my high school, when I was in middle school I think. All Apple IIs. Everyone wanted to use the one Apple II with the Koala pad.so I never got to play with it. I learned to program on my VIC-20 and couldn't for the life of me figure out the Apple IIs basic syntax as they didn't have any manuals or anything.
Then my middle school got a lab of PS/2 Model 25s hooked up with Netware. Our computer teacher was awesome, an old-school programmer who usually taught math. He let
Silicon Valley in the 80s (Score:2)
Growing up in Silicon Valley in the 80s, you can imagine that we had well outfitted computer labs probably a little bit ahead of the rest of the country. (my wife was not exposed to computers at all where she grew up in the deserts of Southern California until the early 90s, as an example)
In the 80s, Apple was already doing its "give computers to schools" thing to get kids hooked on their product, and the rest of the labs usually had TRS-80s, which we derisively referred to as "Trash-80s" because they rea
And yet, nary a one of these so-called visionaries (Score:2)
And yet nary a one of these so-called visionaries came up with a way for me to go back through time and blow my brains out all at once, huh?
Venezuela. We had no computer rooms in HS (Score:2)
Having said that, you want me to remember the computer lab in the academy for kids that tought Basic and logo? Check
You want me to remember the computer room in the private academy were I learned basic (again), cobol and RPG-II? Check
You want me to remmeber my fist computer lab at Uni in '89 (a bunch of Epson Equity computers in a corner room with ample windows to the outside)? Check
The lab of PDP-11 terminals that were in fact Epson QX-10 CPM machines were I could type my papers undisturbed in wordstar and
Yep (Score:2)
We did have one in the early '70s (Score:2)
The school district had an HP-2000 system capable of timesharing 32 terminals, where were 110-baud ASR TTY or equivalent devices. (A higher end model could timeshare 64 terminals. It was housed in the district's data processing center which had an IBM 1401 that did most of the computing (payroll, class schedules, etc) for the whole district. Various schools had terminals connected to the HP-2000 via modems via dedicated leased lines.
In the high school there was a room with about 10 terminals, and many
Yes. (Score:2)
My high school only had a teletype operated Olivetti machine with a Z80 and 64 KB ram. My university had a 68000-operated NCR Unix machine with 8 serial terminals. I think it have 1 or 2 MB ram and 40 MB disk.
No computer room, just a single ASR33 (Score:2)
Yeah, formatted the computer once (Score:2)
in an attempt to format my floppy disk.
My high school didn't have a computer room (Score:2)
Freedom and discovery (Score:2)
Mr. Wright let us figure things out ourselves and trusted that, without his guidance, we'd have to get creative
I remember when we finally got computers in at school; before, we did assignment on punch cards that the teacher sent in to run. We had 16 C64s, connected to 2 shared floppy drives. Typical for those days, some kids knew more about them than the teachers. But the best part was: if you had an hour without classes, and there was no lesson scheduled in the computer room, you could go and collect the key from the janitor and use the computers. Unsupervised; the kid who collected the key was supposed to be i
Didn't have one. My first computer was ... (Score:2)
... a Sharp PC 1402. PC as in 'Pocket Computer'. It had less than 2kb RAM, but it had Basic built in. And a Qwerty keyboard. Still have a successor I brought a few years later, the 1403H, with the same exterior and 10kb of RAM. Best battery time on a turning complete device ever. Two Button cells that need replacement every two decades or so.
Those handheld computers were awesome. I miss them. Later on I had a clamsshell Highscreen Pocket PC with MS DOS 5 and MS Works 5 in ROM. Micro Parport and Serial incl
80s Computer Lab in all its glory (Score:2)
Gloom and Doom (Score:2)
At my first school, class 7-9, I was supposed to study "Electronics". The class had mostly low-achievers, so we got to play Prince of Persia and Sim City on IBM XTs instead of learning much.,
At the second school (class 10-12), we were a bunch who had got special privilege to the computer rooms, where there were mostly no-name 386:es and 486:es. We used them for programming and 3D modelling, but mostly for writing essays. ... and things degenerated. At one recess, both rooms were full o
Then Doom was released
I remember the weed (Score:2)
11130 and Fortran (Score:2)
My HS had an 1130, complete with a line printer that you programmed with punch cards. I learned Fortran, and our teacher was pretty hands off as to what we did with the machine. His big thing was having good logic , clear flowcharts, and very tight code, given the constraints of the machine. Never do in 3 lines what yo can do in two. Our test had a line of code, a few blanks, and more code, you had to figure out what code to write and not use more than the allowed lines; bonus points for less. When we
Early to mid 80s, TRS-80 Model III (Score:2)
In high school they offered a "Computer math" class. The room had a dozen or more TRS-80 Model III computers. The class was just learning to do simple programs in BASIC. I think the teacher was staying a chapter ahead since she did not seem to know much more than whatever we were covering. A couple of us that had already learned some BASIC programming on our own easily impressed the teacher and we were left to do our own thing.
LAUSD in the 80's (Score:2)
About 1981 to 1984 at my local high school. What memories. Computer lab was in the same room as the Chess Club.
Started off with a single Radio Shack Model III, an Apple II, and a terminal that connected to LAUSD's "something or other" system via a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem. There was a dot matrix printer that was forever printing banners of the USS Enterprise - why? Because someone would come in and slam the door to the classroom and the printer would go haywire, ruining the banner. Programming assi
Commodore 64 (Score:2)
I grew up in southeastern PA, in the hometown of Commodore International. So my elementary school had a single Commodore 64 in every room. My middle school has two computer rooms: an Apple lab and a C64 lab. No Windows labs (early 90's).
1989-1993: mostly MacPluses (Score:2)
I'm at the tail end of 'GenX', and I went to the "Science and Technology" high school (OHHS for any PG folks), so we actually had multiple "Computer Labs" by the time I graduated (one was a dozen Apple IIs (][e?), while the other two had MacPluses (upgraded by my senior year with external floppy drives so you never had to eject the system disk... I think it was System 6 or System 7?), connected via an AppleTalk network to a ImageWriter (dot matrix line feed) printer.
I think the second MacPlus lab went in ar
WHAT "Computer Room"? (Score:2)
I was in high school from 1964-1968. The only keyboards in the school were in the typing class, or in the office. My generation INVENTED computers, we didn't grow up with them.