The computer room in your school

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By hamlet

Scribe (4106)

hamlet's picture

01-02-2022, 12:21

...and all the things that were in there.

Do you remember?
In southern Germanys schools it was of course a good chance to find Commodore computers. Although, in the neighbouring grammar school, however, there were Apple II computers. We didn't envy them.
We had computer courses from around 1984. Most of the time, we students knew better than our teachers.
A small room contained 4 C64s with datasettes connected to green monitors, only one had a 1541 floppy drive and a colour monitor.
We met and exchanged and played pirated copies of GI Joe, Raid over Moscow, Impossible Mission, H.E.R.O. and Hunchback. That's certainly one reason why my first computer had to be a C64.
What was the situation like for you?

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By meits

Scribe (6571)

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01-02-2022, 13:43

In elementary school we got a Philips NMS8245 with a VS0080 screen and a VW0030 printer in a special room, where kids were not allowed Big smile
After that I went to a school where they had a real computer room. Filled with Philips NMS9100 PCs with amber monochrome screens (like the green one by Philips). Horrible machines they were. Quite a step back from the NMS8280 I say. They even went back to the 5,25" disks on that one Running Naked in a Field of Flowers

By ducasp

Paladin (712)

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01-02-2022, 14:03

In Brazil, at least by the whole 80's era and beggining of 90's, it was not common to have computers on schools, even for teachers, they usually had access to type writers and mimeographs, at least not on public schools, can't vouch for private schools though. Mid 90's I was fortunate enough to attend a highschool that was a concept, and there was a big lab with many old IBM PC's clones (which we used DOS and played monkey on gwbasic), which we used for some classes.

My first access to a computer was due to my father work, he was a salesman that visited many factories, and sometimes he would take me along with him... In one of those visits, I was amazed with a small room that had two computers in it (so far, the most enjoyable thing was to convince secretaries to let me use their type writer, and when it as an electric type writer, that was so, so, so cool!), so I've pestered the guy that worked on that room and he showed me quite a lot of things on those old computers (one was an IBM PC XT clone, the other a computer running CP/M, from Prologica, probably a clone of some system as well). The end result was that the guy really liked how I was into that stuff and he talked to my father and convinced him to buy me a personal computer (at that time I had an Odyssey 2 and an Atari 2600), that computers would be the future and since I was interested in it, it would be great if I had early access to them. And he recommended the "Gradiente Expert" as a nice machine, how lucky I was... At that time, ZX Spectrum clones were way more "affordable" (perhaps less absurdly expensive would be the correct sentence Tongue) but for sure Expert and Hotbit (our local MSX machines) had a lot more bang for your buck.

So, way before seeing any computers on school, I had my own computer... Most of my neighbors at that time also saw that computer way before having access to any computer in any place.

Quite unfortunate that in Brazil, 80's and early 90's, kids had no access to computers. I was quite lucky and privileged to have access to computers in my early childhood.

By Latok

msx guru (3960)

Latok's picture

01-02-2022, 15:13

In my time, at elementary school, there were no computers. The first computer I used, in 1984, was an Acorn Electron which could be rented from the local library. At high school, at some point, a computer room was introduced with IBM PC XT clones. On those machines I programmed GW-BASIC. But by that time I already had a VG8235 at home....

By guantxip

Paragon (1615)

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01-02-2022, 16:49

In my school there was a computer room. I did a Logo course. All the computers were Philips 8020 with a green phosphor monitor and had an external floppy drive and played Konami games from the floppy. It was in 1986 or 1987.

By ray2day

Paladin (752)

ray2day's picture

01-02-2022, 17:15

At my elementary school (1986) we had one Philips VG8235 MSX2 I can remember. Mainly used to play around with (Radarsoft Topografie etc.). When I went to high school the first year (1987) I remember a class room full of Philips P2000's (yes, those with the small cassette/datatapes!) and indeed monochrome green screens (purpose to teach the students BASIC), but for me it felt like a step back because I already was used to my Philips NMS8245 MSX2 with colour TV at home.

By valkyre

Paladin (699)

valkyre's picture

01-02-2022, 19:18

BBC micro's here in the UK. Our school was also lucky enough to have the 'doomsday' disk.

By hamlet

Scribe (4106)

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01-02-2022, 19:54

I was heavily impressed with the IT development in the UK when I read about the Doomsday project and its hardware in the mid-1980s. Britain was way ahead of its time.

By CASDuino

Champion (358)

CASDuino's picture

01-02-2022, 20:18

BBC micro here as well with Doomsday. I know our school was mentioned. Then in High school it was Link 480z which had GW BASIC which was very close to MSX BASIC.

By Samor

Prophet (2220)

Samor's picture

01-02-2022, 22:28

There were no computers to use in elementary school. When I went to high school it was pc's already. In computer class when you had finished you were allowed to play some games that were installed. I had a lot of fun playing ski or die and accolade's winter games... in retrospect, some teacher must have liked those games.
hm, oh yeah, there was mahjong (shanghai) too. I took a liking to that.

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6092)

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02-02-2022, 00:25

In elementary school when I was doing firsts years we had only some after school computer club that used misc. selection of home computers (VIC20, C64, MSX etc.), but I was newer part of it as I was maybe a bit too young. When I changed school few years later, my new elementary school had already some ultra modern computer class running on 286 PCs or so, that introduced us to things like basic usage of optical mouse (required special mouse pad) and a hand scanner. (Offtopic: In Japan also MSX interfaces were available for these scanners). We anyway had only very limited number of these still very experimental "computer aided learning"-classes.

The real computer classes (optional) started only when I went to junior high school. At that time I had already used MSX for quite some time. In there we had a bit older IBM 5160 machines. Teacher's computer had even HDD and student computers each had a shared folder on it. (using BNC based token ring network) This approach allowed teacher to easily distribute ie. files that students then needed to modify on exams according to instructions... Due to security by obscurity approach this also allowed me to ie. read exam questions weeks ahead or even modify other student responses while taking the exams. I still very clearly remember one quite irritating fellow student, who needed to take the test again as on his first try he managed to write even his own name wrong... and to a wrong field... and then save the first question form on top of the 2nd form. Oh dear, how terribly clumsy he must have been... and how terribly disappointed the teacher was to his performance when the guy did not even understand how he could have done that mistake... Oh, the memories... but I already started to drift away from the subject. Smile

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