What was your first school computer to use and when?

tezza said:

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

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Canterbury University in Christchurch, NZ had an ancient Burroughs with a panel of flashing neon lights in the late 70's. I used it for a fluid dynamics class finite element exercise in 1978, although students were not allowed anywhere near it.

But my first encounter with a computer of any sort was UCSD's Burroughs B6500 when I took a summer session Algol class there in 1973 while in high school. We were allowed to type out our own punch cards and run them on this massive high-speed IBM card reader.

I don't remember too well but it must have been around 1996. Some random beige box with Windows 95. We were using MS Word. I also remember using an Apple II(*) in the classroom.

paul said:

Canterbury University in Christchurch, NZ had an ancient Burroughs with a panel of flashing neon lights in the late 70's. I used it for a fluid dynamics class finite element exercise in 1978, although students were not allowed anywhere near it.

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Sounds like the first computer I ever worked on, a B260 (or maybe a 240), cousin of the Lost in Space B205:
http://w3.vetrol.com/burroughs-280

But my first encounter with a computer of any sort was UCSD's Burroughs B6500 when I took a summer session Algol class there in 1973 while in high school. We were allowed to type out our own punch cards and run them on this massive high-speed IBM card reader.

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Lots of blinking lights on those as well; those were the days... ;-)

I graduated HS in 1971 so never had access to a computer in school. I first encountered a computer in college in 1976, a timeshare to a mainframe where our only access to the computer was a card hopper and a printer. The mainframe was on the other end of the wire somewhere.

carlsson said:

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.

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Wow, it's amazing that this game spread internationally even without an english translation. I wonder if Radarsoft was ever aware how well received their software was, even in other countries. There was no internet back then in the general publicly accessible sense as we have it today. They might never have realized it back then, since much software (particularly for the C64) was pirated, and therefore not purchased from them. Otherwise, they would've taken notice of all those international orders coming in. Too bad, because they could have made even more money by exporting their software in different languages.

Unfortunately I can't really remember the first computer I used in school, though I would imagine it was an apple II of some variety. I remember the computer labs in elementary school during the early 90's. Granted by the time I can really recall anything specific about the computers, they were all the macintoshs that were in every classroom. I'll have to say that I didn't get a lot of computer experience in early school or at least I don't remember it.

Mad-Mike's Opelika City School Years

1988-1989 - Never actually used but saw an IBM PC XT (or maybe an original PC) with a 5153 CGA monitor displaying pie charts in the special needs classroom. Principal Blair got an IBM PC AT sometime later in the year.

1989-1990 - First time using the computer lab, which had a table equipped with six sound-card enabled IBM PS/2 Model 25 computers. This was also the first year we had computerized card catalogs in the library - also IBM PS/2 Model 25s. These computers ran some sort of mathmatics application that gave out various colored ribbons for how fast and accuratley you could solve the math problems. It was a huge deal for some reason for us to get the neon green Ribbons, which I remember to my six year old mind seeming to look really cool and radiant on those quasi-VGA monitors.

1990-1991- The Book-It Program, which got us all IBM PS/2 Model 30 286es. These computers were installed one per classroom, and all our teachers had one of those flippy-files full of floppies formatted and setup to self-boot from Drive A with various games on them: Games I recall were an ASCII game called Memory Match, Reader Rabbit, and Math Rabbit.

1991-1992 - The beginning of my experience with "servers". We had 2, WICAT, and EDLAN. WICAT was for Math and Science related programs, and EDLAN was Social Studies and English programs. The servers I actually got to see too, IBM PS/2 Model 80's, big monoliths. I remember seeing an old IBM PC on the server room floor, and by then, the 386 and 486 based IBM EduQuests started coming in, including one brand spankin' new one with a CD-ROM drive for Multimedia applications in the libarary. It was a special day to get to use that, the idea of watching video on a computer at that time was a huge thing to us. Commonly used application of the day was again that math program from 1st grade, bumped up to a 1st grade level, with even more ribbon colors like blue and pink which people were always trying to get the different color of the day. I recall hearing that the IT personnell were able to install different colored ribbons, but knowing what I know now, it probably was because those old Model 25's from 1st grade probably had the EGA display.

1992-1993 - New intermediate school, pretty much every classroom had between 2-4 IBM EduQuest 30, 35, or 40 machines. We started running Windows For Workgroups 3.1x for certain applications on computers other than the multimedia box finally. The computer lab had IBM 50Z and Model 70's installed, which ran a new math/science suite of educational apps of which all I could remember about them was the black background, brown borders, and VGA 256 color graphics. I think I recall something about counting acorns and bears as well. Also had a typing racecar game we were "allowed" to "cheat" at. Other apps included some old writing program with various fonts which may or may not have been an early version of Aldus Pagemaker. I remember this was where I started mucking about in the graphics editor for Linkway Live 1.1, which eventually lead to me making login screen pictures.

1993-1994 - Still with the EduQuests, not much new, except we now had a 256 color version of Oregon Trail to play, and started seeing these DOS based text mode applications for math and science. Rumor had it we also had internet access but we never got to use it even once during that year.

1994 -1995 - Still EduQuests, Linkway was still the program of the day, though now teachers were getting us into using productivity apps, Microsoft Works being the #1 choice (DOS version). I remember some sort of geometry program in Windows 3.1x that I'd use to make Bigfoot truck chassis with around this time when I was bored in the computer lab. Also, we got to use the internet at school, which seemed blazing fast on the schools token ring network compared to the 28.8K at my sister's house. Netscape 2.02 and later 3 were what we used for internet in a suite called "NetVista", which I think the name IBM later reused for their desktop line in the late 90's.

1995-1996 - More of the same, except now we had a science program that had some kind of bicycle rider game that everybody got really hooked on that year.

1996-1997 - Still using the EduQuest 486's. By this time I was always drawing in Linkway and not doing much else, that is unless I was able to surf the internet.

1997-onward - Yet again, still the same now aging IBM EduQuests. Took a typing class where we used all the very very very old IBM PS/2 machines for WP51 to learn typing. I built my typing skills at that point. The school system slowly was moving away from the Edlan/WICAT server model to using Windows 95 based Pentium and Pentium II based IBM PC-300/330/350 machines. I did have an IBM PC 5150 in my auto shop class that I brought in 5.25" floppy games from my Tandy 1000 at home to play on, which I expanded to doing on most of hte schools computers. Somewhere...in the bowels of Opelika High School (if it's sitll there) is an IBM EduQuest 45 with The Secret of Monkey Island installed on it off my sister's orgiinal 720K floppy diskettes..yes, I installed a game to the C drive of a school computer.

Actually, old tech was a major source of hilarity at this point. One time I tried playing Ultima VI on a brand new IBM PC-350 and found out just how far we have come when the Avatar went flying across the map at a stuttering framerate yet still at warp speed. There was the time I played a 2600 Emulator in English class which turned the rest of the class period into a reminiscing session about old video games. And finally, my discovery of network security (or the lack thereof) when trying to run said emulator on one of the EquQuests from within Windows For Workgroups 3.11 and had one of those "I just stepped into the sleeping shark's mouth" moment's when I found out the A drive was not mapped to the floppy drive but rather, mapped to a network share that probably contained student records given there were files with my friend's names.

I still want a copy of Linkway someday, to relive the old times.

If I remember correctly, my first school computer was at Texas Tech University in the mid 1980's with the DEC Rainbow 100B.

Interesting machine. Main thing I rember about it was the hard sectored floppies. The instructor told us we'd need a couple of 5.25" floppies, so I brought wome from home and tried to use them. I was quite chagrined to discover they wouldn't work since they were soft sectored. Had to trudge over to the school bookstore and buy a couple. Surprised me that they sold them separately!

If I remember correctly, we never touched the CP/M side of the unit, staying strictly on the DOS side of the house.

TRS-80 Model III ca. 1982 or 83

Apple IIe in 6th grade (maybe 5th but I don't remember if we had one in that class) and this was in 1985-87. In junior high we had a classroom with IBM's or compatibles and another with Apple IIe's. I had a typing class in the IBM room and general computers and programming in the one with IIe's. I had homeroom in both rooms so that killed a lot of time! In high school which was 89-93 we had a lab with Zenith PC's and a Mac lab I believe. May have been other classrooms with computers. I took a programming class in the room with the Zenith's. Instead of programming ON those PC's we had an account on a VAX we signed into for programming Pascal (there was a PC/Terminal in a math classroom too). I never had a class with the Mac's.

As I recall, my school had an apple in the classroom and PCs in the library. I don't know what kind they were.

My school had an Apple II+ in the library... later they upgraded it to an Apple //c.

When I was a senior in high school they *finally* got a computer lab class. It was an easy A.

I also used to get out of study hall to go down to the Special Ed department where they had a mix of TRS-80 Model III, a TI-99/4a, and Apple IIe computers. I'd take their basic programs and convert them from one computer to the other. Luckily they were all text or simple block graphics so they weren't too hard to convert... just that the TRS-80 didn't have color.

What can I say, I was a nerd. But, it did get me out of study hall.

My, my - how times have changed. When I was in the 5th grade (1951) at Ann Arbor Trail Elementry in Detroit, we finally got a FM radio and could listen to WDET-FM, the Detroit Public School radio staition. That same year, my Dad held out for a 17 inch Starrett table model tv. I didn't have a computer in the class room until 1975, while attending a Navy training school at NAS Oceana, VA. That computer was a 4-bit Varion 620i with revolving drum memory.

i had operate the computer first time in 11th class( 2006).



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When I was four or so years old (1994 or so), we had some kind of Macintoshes in a computer lab at my elementary school. On these we played Oregon Trail, and that was all. Literally don't recall doing anything else on those machines.

After that year I only ever saw PCs in the classroom again, scaling with the years, being behind a good 2-4 years ofc as schools often are.

This thread makes me feel so old. In grade school, there was no computer at school. In grade 9 (1975), my father brought home an Altair kit that I put together, and my career goal switched from wanting to be a helicopter mechanic to a computer anything. In college (1979), we had a couple of S-100 systems, a PET, and a PDP-8.

I'm an olde farte. My school had a teletype unit that connected to the local university. Access was extremely limited and you needed to be an honors student. I wasn't Now I have more "fire-power" than a whole school computer lab.

Rick Ethridge said:

I'm an olde farte. My school had a teletype unit that connected to the local university.

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At least you had access to a computer

In grade 12 I signed up for a statistics class, which was the closest thing we had to a computer class, and it was canceled because not enough students signed up for it.

So, I would say I was "home schooled" in computers, and the classroom had an Altair. :D

My first computer program -- sometime in the 60s -- was in Fortran, and was supposed to print a picture of a rocket. I think we had to write the instructions out on paper and someone at a college computer lab punched the cards based on that. And of course there was a bug in the program and my picture was not what I wanted. I was pretty frustrated with computers in general through college (a small amount of work on Multics) because it was so painful to debug anything, so I was kind of turned off by computers until the home computer era -- a Commodore 64 got me interested again.

At 1982 our comprehensive school was one of the first in hamburg, had a computer room. In my recall there were three Apple II and four CPM 300x. At that time i made my first steps in basic. I was so fascinated about that new technology. One year later i got my first own computer... a Commodore 64.