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Old 06-08-2019, 04:05 PM
crt89 crt89 is offline
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Computers from school

I was always interested in the computers at school and how different they were from home computers.

At the first elementary school I went to we never used any, and I don't remember the teachers using them. One class I do remember some computer in the room that had the "Intel Inside" logo but that's it.

Second elementary school had more computers. Our computer lab had Apple IIGS with 3.5" floppy. They were arranged in circles with an ImageWriter II in the middle. We played games on those like Word and Number Munchers and Oregon Trail once a week. Those were already old then. My last year at elementary school they got replaced during the summer with blueberry iMacs, and there were iMac posters on the walls with the 5 colors. I was so excited about that. Usually on those we went online or played Sim City.

Somewhere along the line computer teacher's desk and another side desk got Macintosh G3 All in Ones, the first white version. I thought those looked super cool with the translucent top.

In the classrooms there most teachers had Macintosh LC 550 or 575 all in ones, or Power PC all in ones. One or two rooms had old 486 computers but I don't remember them used. Most rooms also had StyleWriter and ImageWriter II printers.

Library at one point had 3 computers we could get on, one being a Blueberry G3 tower with 3 legged monitor.

Middle school most teachers had Dell Optiplex, the white ones with 15" monitor, where the case sat underneath the monitor. Most classrooms though also had Macintosh LC 575 which were used for Accelerated Reader testing in language arts, other classrooms I don't remember using them. My math teacher had a 'pizza box' LC III+ and a Quadra 605 in the room too. That LC III+ always fascinated me because the case was so thin. I remember them only being used once on a free day when we played Lemmings on them. The computer lab there had Dell Optiplex in one half and Mac LC 575 in the other part. On a cabinet in the computer lab I remember seeing a Mac SE/30 and an old looking Gateway case for probably a 386. In the media center office there was a Apple IIe case on top of a shelf for some reason. One other classroom also had an LC III+ but later I remember it being dismantled on a cart and then removed.

Later some teachers got newer black/gray Optiplex desktops. Those were my favorite Dells, and I always wondered why that version was never in the magazines we got.

One older history teacher there did use a Mac G3 tower as his personal computer, but he was the only teacher I knew there that didn't have a Windows computer.

In high school there were practically no Macs. At first the teachers had really old looking Dell Optiplex. Later those got replaced with newer black ones. One kinda nerdy Spanish teacher that had been there forever had a computer lab with Apple IIe computers that you could use for extra credit before school. I'm sure when he retired those got junked. They were ancient by the time I was there. He did use a Dell for his personal machine though.

Last edited by crt89; 06-08-2019 at 04:09 PM.
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Old 06-08-2019, 04:08 PM
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When me an 4 of class mates (2 boys, 2 girls) went taking at my school computer lessons in 1996 (something rare in Romania of those days) we had some desktop computers. The could be anything from 386 to early Petium 1.
Oh, none of use learned anything. Nowydays I can understeand how to operate with MS-DOS.
I don't if the monitors where monochrome or colour, but they where 14" I think. Maybe 15".
In high school (I started computer classes in 1998 or 1999, but this time was compulsory) we had the same size at the monitors. But this time I know for sure they where colour. Computer... most probably Pentium 1. At the psihology laboratory there was an old computer assambled in Romania (386 or 486), very slow, whic at that time I considered beeing good to be smashed, but know I know it's collectible... but I think was smashed.
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Last edited by Telecolor 3007; 06-08-2019 at 04:12 PM.
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Old 06-09-2019, 12:20 AM
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In 4th grade, there was one computer in the classroom, and it was mostly for the teacher. I recall it would often, and loudly, announce 'You've got mail!' And all the kids would get a kick out of that. I swear, aol is probably the oldest internet meme.

In elementary school (from about 5th to 8th) we had a computer lab, and it was primarily old Macs, with a few 1st gen iMacs. I believe the first time I had a computer class was 8th grade, and I was sick the first day of school. I remember that because the first day was the ONLY day when computer class acutally taught anything. They taught the kids how to type. I guess, I mean how much can you learn in one day? The rest of the school year was literally having the students fuck around playing games and stuff. I was, and still am, mildly peeved about the whole thing. I actually wanted to learn to type. Of course, I developed the skill later, on my own. Primarily by using AOL instant messenger to talk to friends. So something good came out of AOL, I suppose. :3

In high school we were lucky to have mostly fairly recent Dell xp machines, as they had just started upgrading them. Probably pentium 3 or 4 celeron equivalents, with a few windows 98 machines scattered about, like in the library. However the journalism classroom / school newspaper had ONLY old Tandy machines running DOS. My (then literature) teacher who was in charge of the school newspaper, actually purchased a bunch of old school computers from some other school with his own money to replace them. That became my job, which he offered me: 'take journalism class next year, fix these shitty computers, and get an easy A.'

Bastard let me know on the exact last day of that school year that he was transferring to another school and left me out to dry basically. The new teacher wanted me to fix all that crap AND do journalism stuff. :/ I really didn't like her.

Anyway, those machines were mostly Pentium 1 machines with windows 95. I was able to just barely make XP work on all of them, as long as I didn't install service pack 2. The only reason I couldn't do that was that SP2 took like 3gb, and the machines only had 2 or 3gb hard drives lol. 90% of those 'new' pc's were compact Acer units. We had easily 100 of them, and because of that, me and a friend still have a bunch of them laying around our houses, well over 10 years later lol. Matter of fact, I use 2 of them stacked on a short little table, to hold my mouse pad for my home computer. Speaking of stacks, I remember on several occasions, using a wheeled plastic school chair to carry a stack of those units home to work on them, and I would walk straight out the front door and nobody ever said anything to me. In fact, the security guards often held the door for me.

The one and only tech guy at our school, nice guy though he was, was about as lazy as they come. Perpetually 'out to lunch' type of guy. Which made me the school's unofficial computer tech. I'm not even joking, in a school of about 2000 kids, I was the go-to guy, and I actually wound up getting out of classes a lot because someone needed computer fixing. They even tried to start a sort of 'club' of computer tech students to help with all the school computers. Actually wound up being a summer gig one year, made a bit of cash. It was me, my friend, and a group of 3, which were 2 Serbs and a Bosnian. They would always joke about how much they 'hated' each other.

Last edited by MadMan; 06-09-2019 at 12:30 AM.
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Old 06-09-2019, 01:02 AM
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When I grew up in Ontario my school district had a contract with IBM, so everything was IBM. Even in later years when they replaced all the old DOS and Token Ring systems the newer stuff was still all IBM.
When I moved out east in 2000 it was totally different. For the first two years my elementary school was a mismash of whatever they had that would boot the same disk image of Windows 3.1, plus some games and educational software. Then it all became a fleet of Compaq's running RedHat. Everyone hated it. By the time I reached highschool it was still a mix of Compaq and Seanix machines running windows 98 and it remained that way until at least a year after I graduated in 2008.
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Old 06-20-2019, 01:13 PM
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In elementary school, early on we didn't have computers at all. Then, we got a computer lab - it was all Apple II, Apple IIe, and the black bell and Howell version of the IIe. Everyone would run to try and be first to get one of the computers which had a colour monitor. The colour monitors were made by Commodore. Don't remember what the printers were other than Apple dot matrix.

Jr. high had Apple IIGS based labs, and high school had a mix of one lab with 512k Macintosh, and another with 386. I think visual communications class had some Macintosh Performas, for doing graphic design. I preferred the B&W photo lab, to be honest! In Grade 12, they had two computers in the library with internet access - prior to that no internet anywhere.

University we had different things.. Some PC labs, with generic 486 PCs running Windows 3.1, but the interesting ones were the Sun Microsystems Solaris workstations, and the HP-UX Unix lab. I thought Solaris was ahead of its time. Was in university while internet was really taking off.. One of the SUN labs had monochrome screens, the other had enormous high resolution Trinitrons, and CD-ROM drives. Now those were some real computers - finally.

The worse "computers" I had to work with though, were the one lab which still had HP "dumb terminals", using the world's least user friendly text editor, VI. If I never see those two letters together again, I'll be happy!
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Old 06-26-2019, 09:24 PM
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Mid-80's, the middle school computer lab had Apple IIe along with a few oddballs that we never played with (I know there was a Commodore PET). I went to a "talented & gifted" program a couple summers (woo-hoo! ain't I smart!) at the local community college & they had the same IIe setup. All I remember doing was copying programs that, if you didn't have any typos, would do simple things like make the screen scroll until you hit escape, or some such. Everything was "green screen".

I don't think I took computer lab in high school until 12th grade (89/90), by which time they had Macs. I couldn't tell you the model, aside from they had the small screens. I don't remember anything that made me think, "wow, I need to talk Mom & Dad into buying me one of these!" At that point I had no clue as to the true capability of a computer; I'd say much of that had to do with teachers having to cater towards the "lowest common denominator".
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Old 06-27-2019, 07:23 PM
Bill R Bill R is offline
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When I was in school personal computers as we know them had not been invented yet. Our "keyboarding" consisted of old Royal and Underwood manual typewriters. Just one step from a stone and chisel.
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Old 06-27-2019, 09:57 PM
Titan1a Titan1a is offline
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No computers in school. All we had in late high school was a time-share terminal. Obviously, teletype printer only.
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Old 06-28-2019, 12:29 PM
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Those teleprinters where made by "Teletype Corporation" and where Model 33?
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Old 07-05-2019, 07:45 AM
Dude111 Dude111 is offline
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Most schools I went to had APPLE computers all thru the years..... I got pretty good with basic on an Apple

But not nearly as good as on my Commodore!! (I love Basic)
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Old 07-05-2019, 09:18 PM
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I was in 7th grade in 1979/80 and our school had a TRS-80 Model-I with 16K of RAM and Level II BASIC. It had a cassette drive. In high school, we had Apple ][+'s, a few //e's and later on, //c's Our computer lab had networked TRS-80 Model-III all networked to a master Model-III, later Model-IV. The network was great, the only bad thing is if you hit reset, to get back in, you had to reboot the master system. This was from 1982 to 1985.
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Old 07-06-2019, 12:26 AM
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You had a mini computer network?
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Old 07-06-2019, 12:46 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Telecolor 3007 View Post
You had a mini computer network?
Yes we did, it had like about 15 or 20 TRS-80 Model-III's on the network tied into the master Model-III or Model-IV. We also had a printer too, a dot matrix where anyone could print. WE had one cardinal rule, of course, it was always broken, never hit reset because rebooting the network was a pain in the butt when you had to do it all the time, man we did drive Mr. George, the teacher, crazy. BTW, we saved our work on the master's 5.25" floppy, the TRS-80's used TRSDOS. Each Model-III had like 32K of RAM and the Master Model-III had 48K and the Model-IV had 64K. It was state of the art for 1983. We had a couple of stand alone TRS-80 Model-I's too.

The IBM-PC and PC/XT was just getting started and us kids in the computer club were interested in seeing it. It was used by the Guidance Department, Student Counselors, and the man who ran it at the time, Mr. Alexander, said to us, "if you touch that IBM, I'll break your arm!" So we stuck BASICally (pun intended ) to the TRS-80's and Apples of various marks although privately, some of us had TI-99/4A's (I have one), an occasional Sinclair ZX81/Timex Sinclair 1000, a few Atari 400/800's and of course, Commodore 64's. I admit I miss those old machines, I'd get more satisfaction writing my own stuff in BASIC than the machines we have now. I knew a fellow student who had an Apple ][ clone, the Franklin Ace 1000.

I remember the computer lab got Apple MacIntoshes in 1988 or so, for some reason I remember Rick Astley's songs were big at the time. They were networked too. BTW, I remember my teacher had connections w got hold of the first Apple MacIntosh model in November of 1983, two months before it came on the market.
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Old 07-06-2019, 01:04 AM
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Networks... nice. I don't know if in general school we had a network. At high school as far as I can rember no. At the Economics Academy we had - there was internet too, but we arleady talking about 2002-2003!
Having a mini network back then it was very nice I think! And dot matrix printer... homes still used them in the early '000's!
Here is something intresting! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE1kE0-yNW8
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Old 07-06-2019, 10:34 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Telecolor 3007 View Post
Networks... nice. I don't know if in general school we had a network. At high school as far as I can rember no. At the Economics Academy we had - there was internet too, but we arleady talking about 2002-2003!
Having a mini network back then it was very nice I think! And dot matrix printer... homes still used them in the early '000's!
Here is something intresting! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE1kE0-yNW8
I've seen that too in old articles where they had computer terminals that hooked into an offsite, timeshare system back in the 1960's to early 1970's Some schools had that. There was a TV show from around 1969 to 1973 called "Room 222" about a high school and the students from that time. I remember one episode where the computer guru was able to hack into banking networks (based on a true story from that time) where it took the fractional cents where he cut them off and shunted them into his own account. He was raised by a single mother and he was able to buy her everything she wanted by doing that. He got caught and I think he was let off if he would put his skills into good use and also maybe catching bad hackers, it's been a while since I've seen it.
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