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What was your first school computer to use and when?

carlsson said:
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.
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I remember having to write stuff out by hand and have it checked over and corrected before we got to type it up on a computer. Kind of missed the point, I though - it's much easier to edit your work when it's already in the computer! With only enough computers for about half the class at a time, I guess the rest needed something to keep them busy...
 
barythrin said:
I thought an interesting question would also be what computers you used in school and what year was it?
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My school district had a Commodore Pet 2001 (with chicklet keys) that got passed from school to school starting in about 1977 or so. That was the first PC I ever touched.

They also had a DEC system (PDP-10, I think) shared amongst the various schools with a few DEC printer/terminals at each school. We did our programming classes on those. . .

I was, for a while, an absolute master of TECO. :D
 
Erik said:
I was, for a while, an absolute master of TECO. :D
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What does your name do in TECO? :D

My first school "computer" was actually just an ASR-33 Teletype with an Andersen-Jacobson acoustic coupler and a telephone. To program in BASIC, we would dial into an HP-2000 located a few towns away. I remember we weren't allowed to save our programs to disk because disk space was expensive (a strange concept today). Instead, we'd punch them to paper tape. That was the mid-Seventies.

Andy
 
I sorta remember my first experience in school was during my Freshman year of College in 1972.I took a Basic Programing course(and Passed!).We did our programs on Punch Cards and then fed them to some kind of Humongous IBM mainframe.That was interesting.
cgrape2
 
Unfortunately there were no computer classes while I was in school. The only system in my high school (73 - 77) was a terminal connected by acoustic coupler to a server at a nearby college that the guidance counselor used for students to print out information on different employment educational requirements. The first computer I ever got to work with was a HP 1000 used in a computerized test bench in the US Air Force in 1983. The first DOS based system I ever used was a government Zenith Z-184 laptop (8088).
 
I was in elementary school in the mid 80's and pretty much every classroom had a TI 99/4a (1 per room) so we could play Hunt the Wumpus (really the only thing I remember doing with it) There were 2 C-64's in the library that I pretty much had free run of as I was in the 'accelerated math program' (read: GEEK). In Jr Hi it was predominately Apple IIe's and LOGO and then into the first part of HS where it was also IIe's but the language was Pascal. I started to lose interest in tech about that time and my geek self turned into more of a motorhead. From there on (and well into my 20's) it was all cars for me. But I do remember that the comp labs got macintosh's towards the end of my HS career. By then I was using an Amiga at home and computers were merely a way to play video games.

-Lance
 
Mine was in the school year, 1980/81, when I was 11. DEC VT-100 dumb terminals linked to some unknown server somewhere. I remember having to use a username and password to log in. They started to teach us BASIC on it.

Then my mother bought me a Commodore VIC-20 that Christmas, and all hell broke loose - I was hooked. TV? What's that? Oh, the thing my puter connected to! heh

Otherwise, schools progressed to the IBM XT and Apple IIe/IIgs machines, and some Tandy 1000-SX machines. A few classes had some "token" Commodore 64s - not enough for the whole class, but some of them had like 2 or 3 each room. From that point, it was fairly predictable - They followed the 286, 386... By the time I was out of high school they were just getting the first 486s. I'm not sure, but I think the 486 machines were 25MHz? Can't remember.
 
The maths department of my secondary school had a couple of TRS-80's back in the early 80s. Can't remember what model they were but they both had 5.25" floppy drives. Although I never used the maths applications they had, I do remember a few of us sneaking into the store room where they were kept outside of lessons and playing either chess or a text based adventure game (similar to colossal cave).

Steve

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I went to school in South Africa. The first machine in our school were installed when I was in Std 1 (3rd Grade) so around 1989. They were 286 machines running DOS (probably 5). They were not networked and we used them very infrequently. I remember playing Tetris on them.

In High school I was involved with the group that managed to get one of the parent to donate some used machines to our computer lab. So we put in about 20 or so 386 machines and networked them together with a 10baseT network. That would have been about 1995. We used to play the free-ware/demo versions of games against each other in the lab during out breaks. They were also the machines I learned to program in Pascal during my first Computer Science class. I think they were running DOS 6.22, but they could have been Windows 95.
 
All the schools here in the UK had BBC Micros, some right up until the mid '90s! Most were then replaced by various Acorn Archimedes, which where subsequently replaced with generic PCs around 1995-1996.

I remember doing my Business Studies coursework in the only room that actually had "real" PC's! Lots of 286/386 machines, the one I used was an IBM 5170, but I think it had a 386 motherboard inside as I remember it running Windows 3.something quite well.

I spent two years at College (not University! College is one level down from that) from 2000-2002. Some of the outdated computer rooms I used had IBM XT's and AT's, but fitted with later 386/486 motherboards, VGA monitors, etc. I always remember the sound of 40 students flicking "the big red switch" on the side, fantastic!
 
TRS-80 AIO system with the dual 5.25" and B&W monitor built in and an original IBM PC in highschool during the early 1980's (graduated in 1986). These were in the math class that functioned as a computer lab during different times of the day.
 
The first school computer I saw (first computer I ever saw in real life) was a Commodore PET 4032 in 1981. The school didn't even get to keep it. It was just "on loan" for a couple days - to amaze the kids. A short while later, the school got a TRS-80 Model III. I think that one the school was allowed to keep, but under strict control. The teacher could wheel it out for special occasions. There was no such thing as "computer class" at that time.

My first actual computer class was in grade 10 and the computers we used were Commodore 64s. There were only 7 or 8 of them so we had to share. (some guys brought in disks and we played games during lunch) Of course, I had no need for computer class anyway. By that time, I had already been programming my own computer for 3 years and knew far more than the teacher. I just took the class because it was an easy course.

The first computer class where everybody had their own computer to use (what luxury) was grade 11 (different school), using the now "uber-rare" Burroughs Icon. Anybody out there ever use the Burroughs Icon?
 
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I went to middle school in 1981-1983. There was a small room between two classrooms...an English classrom and math classroom. It looked a little like a recording studio control room and I think it had wood paneling. In any case, from what I was told, they had a dedicated link to the Drew University computer lab and probably a teletype. But when I got there all that stuff was ripped out and replaced with two TRS-80 Model III's. That was my first exposure to a microcomputer. I got yelled at so many times for not sharing (sometimes I would take up both machines at the same time.) That was a lot of fun. In 1982 I got my own VIC20 for my birthday so I didn't have to hog the school's machines all the time.

Our high school had a Prime computer, I forget which model. The school was set up as a small campus with lots of little buildings that each had 4 or 6 classrooms. The Prime was set up in one classroom space and another adjacent classroom had all the 300 baud terminals and printers set up. There were various Apple II and I think one PET in the science classrooms, but eventually they got an Apple II lab that I think had a Corvus Omninet shared hard disk.
 
tezza said:
Err...the nearest thing I got to a computer at primary and high school (1962 - 1975) was a slide rule!


Tez
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Yeah, talk about making some of us feel old.
I'm the same as Tezza - graduated high school in 1975, and had never seen a computer in any class - not even on the school's office !
I did have an electronic calculator though, and that was cool. Not a programmable one, just the basic functions.
There were IBM Selectrics in the office, and a mimeograph machine for making multiple copies.
 
For me, it's one of two, and I don't quite remember which.

Either a first gen purple iMac, or a PS/2 (either a Model 30, 30-286 or a 55; it was that particular case with a red switch so most likely a 30)

This would have been in grade school in the mid to late 1990s.

Memories of the PS/2 include a MECC trivia muncher game...the iMacs were miserable and constantly down. This may be where I got my deep rooted dislike for Apple, and why I refuse to believe the crap that they "just work".

Edit: looks like the PS/2 must have been first; surely I had laid my fingers on that Model M sometime before 1998 when the iMac came out.
 
The very first computer I remember having in school was an Apple IIe, and I played, you guessed it, Oregon Trail.

Otherwise in middle school there was a classroom full of Apple LC II's and 575's, and they were mostly used with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Although the teacher made us promise not to tell anyone about the little games on some of them...
 
For me it was Atari 400s and an Atari 800. In my 6th grade math class where we were taught BASIC programming, every Friday on these systems. So it would have been about 1982. If I remember correctly, we had 3 Atari 400 and 1 Atari 800. In 7th or 8th grade, we had some Apple II, but I don't remember using those much. In high school, we used Heathkit/Zenith PC compatible systems (Heath Company was only about 10 minutes north of the high school). We had programming classes covering, BASIC, Pascal, and Fortran. Then also a 2 hour-block class, covering databases, spreadsheets, word processing, and COBOL. It was quite an unique and advance curriculum for 1984-1988.
 
Hi
I never saw a computer until 1970 or so while in the Navy.
I don't recall what it was because they wouldn't let me play with
it. It was two heavy clam shell cabinates about 5 feet tall.
It had all of its logic on descrete logic cards and had core
logic. At least it had transistors and not tubes.
Dwight
 
Jeez...


I felt lucky that we had ELECTRIC typewriters in typing class! :mrgreen:

I think the closest thing we had to a computer was an abacus.


8)
 
I dont recall what the school computer was, but I do recall it had Windows 95 on it...Lets see, this was back in 1st grade, in 96 or 97. I remember playing "Oregon Trail" on it, and it was even on CD! Or, I'm pretty sure it was. In middle school, with computer labs, they were all P3 or P4s. When I moved to WV, going to high school, there was one Tandy 2000RX or something like that. Been awhile since I've used Tandy's. Anyhow, it was a small system with one 5.25 drive and one 3.5, no room for any more internal drive expansion.

The first computer I ever used is one I still have--An AT&T PC 6300 back in 93 or 94. My first modern computer was an AMD-K6 Compaq of sorts, whereas my brothers had a Packard Bell Pentium 1. Ah, the days of playing Doom, Duke Nukem, Monster Truck Madness, Sims 1, etc.

--Ryan
 
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