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What was your first school computer to use and when?

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barythrin

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On the similar line of Tezza's question on why schools don't seem to want old computers, I thought an interesting question would also be what computers you used in school and what year was it? I don't know if the perception changed over time and I find it interesting how many years a lot of this spanned over.

So my first school to have a computer was Porter Middle School in Austin. So 7th grade was my school education in computer programming. Some dirty math would say it was 91 or 92 for 7th grade for me. We learned programming (Apple Basic) on Apple IIe systems. I'd run home and try to type the app into our 8088 Zenith and it would never work, so my dad whipped out the trusty Basic manual which came with our system and I sat down and read it and tried to port all the commands over. Some of course weren't valid and my dad helped me with a few at the time but eventually I started writing my own spaghetti code at home.

The other semi-obsolete years were in highschool (96-98) we mainly used IBM PS/2 Model 25s which were all networked together to teach us applications like Microsoft Works 4 and Word Perfect 5.1 (dos apps). I think that was mainly it.. once I was close to graduating they got in some Dell units that were PII 233 and eventually 2 PII-350's in 98.

I'm just curious what others were taught in certain years and how long certain systems and applications spanned the learning circuit.
 
We might have a bit different school systems, but for me the first school computer was a Commodore PET. That came in 1984 when I was 16/17 and at the gymnasium.
It was also the first computer at the school ever, and there was only one (the school had about 1300 pupils)
Two years later they bought about 6 Philips P2000 machines, but that was past my time :)
 
Our high school had just updated from Commodore Vic-20 to the Commodore 64 when I took the school's computer class. That would have been around 1985-ish.

Never used a computer in school again, except for a tiny bit of word processing in college. That was at the school's computer lab - no idea what sort of computer it was, a generic PC probably.

Never had one of my own until 2000.
 
Around 1997, some kind of IBM branded pc running win95. (Elementary school) We also had a few color all-in-one Macintoshes. (Don't know what model exactly)

Around 2000/2001, I discovered an Apple //e in the school library that hadn't been touched in years. I messed around with that for awhile, but then they decided to toss it. They wouldn't let me take it home over some kind of technicality in the rules. (Property of the school district, they probably recycled it) Much later I found another one for free, and that got me started here!
 
Do I show my youth by mentioning I had owned a computer for two years before I got to use my first computer in school? Anyway, I missed out on the ABC-80 generation so the first school computer [1988] was the highly custom built Compis (80186 system) which already was 3-4 years old.
 
The first I came across at school must've been some kind of BBC Micro in the mid eighties, as was pretty standard for UK schools at the time. I don't remember using it that much although, being the only computer at the school, I don't suppose anyone did. Aside from the boring educational games, you could do some word processing on it. I forget what the program was called... Folio, maybe? I'm pretty sure there was a copy of Chuckie Egg there too somewhere and maybe even Pole Position. By that time we'd had a Spectrum at home for quite some time anyway, which I was much more familiar with.

What I remember best, though, is the lab full of RM (Research Machines) Nimbus computers in high school. 80186 machines, IIRC, and sort of PC compatible. You could run Paint and some early version of Word for DOS on them (2.0?) and there where a few games floating around on floppies. One of my earlier hacks came about when I discovered you could open the executables in Word and edit any ASCII text you came across. Needless to say, there where soon several versions of the WORM game (a snake clone) with titles screens sporting rather less tasteful four-letter words then the original... The machines were later replaced by 486SX 33MHz boxes, but the Nimbus network remained functional. At some point a student got hold of the admin password; everything naturally went downhill after that ;-)
 
cosam said:
BBC Micro...
RM Nimbus...
Click to expand...

This was my school computer experience too. I started school in 1984 and at that time the school owned a single BBC Micro, which was on a trolley and pushed round to each class that wanted to use it. The school got a couple more BBCs while I was there, but I don't remember using them much - vague memories of some educational games, but that's about it.

My middle school had a mix of BBCs and Nimbuses (Nimbii?), but again I don't really remember using them much, except for some BBC text adventure game about sailing round the coast of Africa.

My high-school had dozens of Nimbus not-quite-PCs. They'd bought them in the mid 80s, but stuck with them until 1995. They were all diskless and booted from a central server. The network was some sort of ring-based affair, and pulling out one of the network cables in any classroom bought the whole network down. The Art department also had an Amiga 2000.
 
hmbrew said:
They wouldn't let me take it home over some kind of technicality in the rules. (Property of the school district, they probably recycled it) Much later I found another one for free, and that got me started here!
Click to expand...

Exactly what happens at my school. If I talk to the right people, I can get some stuff, but the second I ask the "Technology Coordinator" for, say, a broken Zip drive, she says no. I did get a 5.25" drive from someone else at school!

Kyle
 
Apple II (possibly II+) running LOGO Graphics (aka "The Turtle") in elementary school. Only a few kids were chosen to have computer time; I was one of them. They had two, later four, A2s in the library, and pretty much all you could do on them was LOGO (this was in first grade.)

By fifth grade, there were a few more (possibly IIe's,) and they had the Apple II staples of Oregon Trail, Math Muncher, etc.

In middle school (grades 6-8,) moved up to the "Where in the {xyz} is Carmen Sandiego" series, and had first experience on a Macintosh (likely a Plus, based on the timing.)

In high school, ranged from a 'typing lab' of Apple IIs of various sorts; to a 'computer lab' full of shiny-new hard-drive-equipped Macintosh SEs, to a 'drafting lab' of dual-floppy SEs Freshman year all the way up to a 486 and a Quadra Senior year. (Yes, exactly one 486, and one Quadra in the entire school. A bunch of IBM 386 PS/2s, and a bunch of Apple IIsi's, though.)

But we did have a Sequent 386 "mini-supercomputer", with 24 386 chips in it.
 
The basic programing I took in High School was done on an ASR 33 teletype. It was a time share setup with some computer in Chicago. All our work was sent in via acoustical modem and we had to sometimes wait two or three days to get the results back. This was around 1974-1975.

Tom
 
lol Wow, I wish I knew what our server environment was in highschool with all the 25s. It was similar though I don't recall the networking. All systems were diskless and booted off the network (bootp I guess). We had a server in the classroom which was the size of a full tower with a unix-ish prompt (we weren't allowed to touch it). I tried playing on it a few times but all I could get was lpr to work lol, I wasn't all that unix savvy so it may have been in some print manager and not a real prompt.

I'd be curious to know what it ran now .. even more curious if they'd tell me lol.

Anyway, Sequent systems sound awesome. I know this isn't the same page but this was entertaining to read and had some additional specs. I lol'd seeing the upgrade from their "Mark IV" to "Mark V"
 
My school system obtained several terminals that linked to Rutgers PDP-10. That was in 76 or 77.

Nice responsive system but the amount of paper generated by interactive Basic development on a Teletype was impressive.
 
My school had PS/2 EduQuest systems everywhere. We were always doing stuff on them from Math Blaster to BASIC (and even in 1995 that was one hell of an old programming language). They were awesome systems. I really wish In had taken up the chance recently to get another one.
 
Err...the nearest thing I got to a computer at primary and high school (1962 - 1975) was a slide rule!

Computers were huge scary things with blinking lights and spinning tapes only seen in science fiction movies and TV programs!

Tez
 
Same here. Slipsticks all around. No electrical boxes.

The first real computer I saw was at MIT when I went for a visit in 1966. They had a whole air-conditioned room full of enclosed racks that were higher than my head. I have no idea of what they were other than cool. :)
 
IBM1130 via an 026 keypunch at first, later I got access to the coveted 029 keypunch. That was in June of 1972. It was a summer program for high school students. I was in 5th grade, and tagged along with an older friend who was in the class so that I could =look= at a real computer. While I was there the instructor let me start writing my programs and didn't mind if I came back to do more, so long as I minded myself. My first program used FORTRAN to print a phaser shape on the line printer. I had been inspired by the obligatory Spock holding Enterprise picture on the classroom wall.

After that, I didn't get access to a computer in school until high school. By that time I'd built myself an Elf at home, and managed to get access to a number of other systems through friends (amateur radio club folks, mostly.)

In high school, IBM "donated" a computer to the school. A really ratty old 709. They then offered to sell a support contract for the thing to the school to the tune of about $25K per year (in 1977!) The administration was actually considering doing it, since they thought it was a good idea for the school to have its own computer. Ignorance on parade. My math teacher told me about it, and I made the rounds of administrators and managed to convince them to give the 709 to the electronics shop, and buy microcomputers for a computer class instead of trying to manage their own piece of big iron (they were also considering a knackered 360 offered to them by another school, along with another expensive support contract.)

The 709 came to the electronics shop, where we got it working and played with programming it (via patchboard) for several months until we disassembled it for its parts when we laid hands on a 7090 to play with.

In my senior year (79-80) the school finally bought a Northstar Horizon with MP/M and four terminals for our first computer class. I did a lot to help the teacher, who was taking a class in computers at the local community college at the same time as running the first year's class. While in the class, I wrote a BASIC compiler for us to use (since the school didn't have the money to buy one that year.)
 
The first computer I used back then was an Atari 400, they taught us "educational" games on it. Also used an Apple ][ that was in the office, I think I was the only one that knew how to make it do anything :)
 
tezza said:
Err...the nearest thing I got to a computer at primary and high school (1962 - 1975) was a slide rule!

Computers were huge scary things with blinking lights and spinning tapes only seen in science fiction movies and TV programs!

Tez
Click to expand...

So while I was lucky enough to come into school just as microcomputers were becoming mainstream; my dad did play with a mainframe when he was in high school. (He went to a Catholic school that had terminals in to the local Catholic university's computer.)
 
Commodore 64

Commodore 64

The Commodore 64, at primary/elementary school, back in the late eighties. :)

We had no more than 3 (!) of them for the entire school! Classes would take turns using them (a kind of time sharing, I guess, but without the UNIX operating system to streamline it :D ).

I remember us playing (actually quite fun) educational games created by a Dutch company called Radarsoft. The most popular one was perhaps a Topography game, a game in which you would control a helicopter hovering above a map of either the Netherlands or Europe (selectable in the menu) with the player having a top-down view. Major cities and capitals would show up as red dots, and the object of the game would be to fly towards each city the game would instruct you to fly to. Of course there would be a timer running as well.

Wow, if I think back about those games (there were more of them), I remember how fun yet educational they were at the same time! It's a shame we didn't get a lot of playtime on them, most likely because as I said we only had 3 of those machines available to all the various classes in the same school.

I remember the same school receiving a bigger computer lab with more computers, Olivetti M24s this time, on loan from a university (which was probably writing them off, because it was almost 1990, and those machines were becoming obsolete even then), but they weren't yet being used by students by the time I left for junior high.

Wow... Memories...:eek:

I found YouTube videos of both the MSX and C64 versions of Radarsoft's Topography game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVuAAdcSlFo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4ud1O44Q8Q
 
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I have also played those Radarsoft games. I can tell you it gets even more difficult when the game is all in Dutch and you only understand a fraction of what it says.

I suppose the number of computers in school would be relative to the number of subjects which would utilize computers rather than the number of students. Our computer lab held about ten Compis machines for a school with at least 350-400 students. The two only subjects in which we got to use computers were some math classes and a special computer course I took. None of the other subjects like language studies, geography, history, chemistry, physics and so on had any computer support. Well, I have a faint memory of once getting to use the computers to write an essay, but I may misremember that. On the other hand, if almost no classes would have use of computers, it would be a rather poor investment for the school to have a lab of 5-10-15-20 computers sit and rot away most of the day.
 
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