1986 film - messaging on computers in high school

amdublin

So I am watching Pretty in Pink on netflix

It's 1986 and they they are in the "computer lab" messaging each other on their computers.

I did "computers" in school in first year in 1990. And what did we do?
Typing!
A typing program!

Any of y'all do anything decent/exciting on computers in schools???
Pre-1998 please!
I am hoping things have got better since then....

Mavis Beacon was the shiz.

Molester Stallone

Played a lot of Frogger

CiDeRmAn

I was in Kevin St college in 89 and got to use their computer lab for a year.
No Internet as we'd know it but the BBS was cool, though mostly full of Star Wars/Trek nerds.

roadsmart

Around 1976 CBS in Swords was the first school in the country to get its own computer. Feckin thing was huge. From what I remember they took half the tuck shop to enlarge the room behind so it would fit. Binary code was the only way to instruct it. I feckin hated binary code. "This'll never catch on", I thought to myself.

TheNumpty

Making designs in Logo on the BBC micro computers

Titzon Toast

1989/90 I think it would have been for me. Something called logos or something similar, where you drew pictures by giving commands to a little icon on the screen telling in to "turn 90 degrees and move forward ten steps and then stop" to draw yourself a little house.
Exciting times!

amdublin

It's just so mad to think about commodore64's and "loading" the games i.e. letting a tape play for about 15 minutes. And half way it just crashed...solution: rewind, start again!
You and your friends just sitting there watching a lines on your computer while it loaded :pac:

If you were lucky some of your games were on a cartridge

vicwatson

Sinclair zx81 - ah the memories! BASIC language, great fun.

DEFTLEFTHAND

I was in sec school from 2002-2007 and our computer classes consisted of going online and basic functions. The classes ceased after Junior cycle and were replaced with 'Careers'. Poor clowns who couldn't even type were sent off for Arts degrees when the careers 'advisor' asked them, What do you want to do with your life? They said 'Dunno'

galwayrush

GOTO 10

Zamboni

Titzon Toast wrote: »

1989/90 I think it would have been for me. Something called logos or something similar, where you drew pictures by giving commands to a little icon on the screen telling in to "turn 90 degrees and move forward ten steps and then stop" to draw yourself a little house.
Exciting times!

That little house with the dog!
Anyone see this online please post a link

conorhal

Only this morning I was sitting with a bra on my head in front of my laptop waiting for Kelly LeBrock to appear, still nothing!

Our first "school computer" wasn't even in the school, it wasn't networked either.

We had to write instructions on a piece of paper in assembler and give them to the teacher who sent them to the county council head office that was "lending" processor time to the schools.

They then typed in the instructions for each one of us and posted back the results.

A week later yo get back a piece of paper with a number on it or an error.

Debugging code was slow!

wilser

galwayrush wrote: »

GOTO 10

10 print "wilser "
20 goto 10
Run


Hours of fun

galwayrush

galwayrush wrote: »

GOTO 10

MOV AX, 47104
MOV DS, AX
MOV [3998], 36
INT 32

Zamboni

I remember there was a promotion in the late eighties were all the students had to collect thousands of tokens (cereal boxes or supermarkets - can't remember) and our school got 1 apple computer.
All the classes were marched in one by one to see this amazing device!
It was never used for anything

keithclancy

Creating stuff on Bannermania and then waiting 45 minutes for it to come out of the dot matrix printer

Maphisto

Around 1973/74 we had access to a university's comp. We had to spend hours punching out Fortran cards. It was so boring. You needed hundreds of them to get it to do the most insignificant thing. That was until some wag discovered that a certain command (I forget, it's a long time ago) would make the thing spew out 100 sheets of paper. Only got to do that once after which computing was replaced with a free period.

keithclancy

keithclancy wrote: »

Creating stuff on Bannermania and then waiting 45 minutes for it to come out of the dot matrix printer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTLuHLj3CbM

SaveOurLyric

wilser wrote: »

10 print "wilser "
20 goto 10
Run


Hours of fun

Hours of run.

Wishiwasa Littlebitaller

Around '83 I hacked into the school's computer with my girlfriend to change our exam grades, but I got a little carried away and hacked into an American military site and started messing around with what I thought was just a nuclear war simulator, which in turn inadvertently almost caused WWIII. You'd think I'd have leaned my lesson, but then a couple of years later I hacked into the school's computer again, this time in an attempt to 'adjust' my attendance records, but the fecking principle decided to come to my house and.. ah, it's a long story but turns out car odometers don't backwards when a car's driven in reverse.

Birroc

wilser wrote: »

10 print "wilser "
20 goto 10
Run

Hours of fun

Why did you need an alias back then?

It was more like this;

10 PRINT "You are a poohead"
20 GOTO 10
<You called your sister into the room>
RUN

The Diabolical Monocle

They had a computer program for us in the slow class but I can't remember what it was.

JuliusCaesar

First laid eyes on a computer in 1980 in the basement of UCD - a huge thing that looked nothing like computers now. Our tutors were useless, and most of us gave up after a couple of tries. We were offered courses in Cobol and Fortran at lunchtime, but most of us preferred to have lunch. If only we'd known!

BBDBB

would anyone like a go on my Jet Set Willy?

WoollyRedHat

Got control of the teacher's computer through remote control because they were all connected to a network, and opened word and typed crude messages. His computer was hooked up to the projector behind him, so everyone could see.

Risky business, we sure were living the crazy life.

Bipolar Joe

I've only realised in recent years how privileged my childhood self was. My Pop worked for Microsoft (Nothing big, just a translator or some shit) so we always had a computer in the house for as long as I can remember. I didn't know how it worked, but I knew it could do amazing things, so I'd sit at it for hours and figure it out. We had an Internet connection and everything, which was rare I think. I used it to meet other computer technicians online, learn what things did what, why they did them and how. When I had to move to England, my Mom got another PC, so I kept it up. After a while I learned you can make computers do things they're not really supposed to, and learned about security. I was a bona fide nerd. There's some stories in it, but the one I liked doing most was making all the computers in the I.T lab in secondary school play Yankee Doodle MIDI over and over and locking the techs out. They were useless and ended up just resetting everything.

Good times.

Arthur Beesley

Wishiwasa Littlebitaller wrote: »

Around '83 I hacked into the school's computer with my girlfriend to change our exam grades, but I got a little carried away and hacked into an American military site and started messing around with what I thought was just a nuclear war simulator, which in turn inadvertently almost caused WWIII. You'd think I'd have leaned my lesson, but then a couple of years later I hacked into the school's computer again, this time in an attempt to 'adjust' my attendance records, but the fecking principle decided to come to my house and.. ah, it's a long story but turns out car odometers don't backwards when a car's driven in reverse.

Do you even have a modulator demodulator, bro?

Ruu

Creating football club banners with Bannermania as well.

They were networked with Thinwire T-connectors (co-ax).

pow wow

Our first computer in school was around 1992 - we were all trooped down class-by-class to view it in the library. It was a big magnolia coloured thing with black keys, except for the top row of keys which were orange. One teacher was in charge of it and guarded it with her life.

She was trying to show us how to do something that involved holding down two keys simultaneously (kinda like CTRL P to print, CTRL C to copy etc.) but it didn't occur to her that you could actually hold either both down together or hold one down first and then the other. So instead, she was like a kamikaze darting in from all sides frantically trying to lightly tap and release both of them at the same time, getting more and more frustrated by the fact that her timing was off and she could never get both of them down at exactly the same time. In the end she told us it was 'broken' and marched us off back to class

We weren't allowed near it from then on. I don't think she was either come to think of it.

Alun

At secondary school in England way back in 1974 we had a deal with the local college whereby we wrote our programs by filling in little squares on punched cards with a soft pencil, 2B or something. These cards were then read by a special machine that had little wire contacts on it that could read the pencil marks, and which then punched out the 'real' punch cards that were fed into the card reader and then run. We got the printout back, usually with loads of syntax errors, either due to our own mistakes, or because the machine that read them was rubbish, corrected and then resubmitted. Trouble was we only had this class once a week, so it could take several weeks to successfully write even the most basic of programs. Great fun I'm fairly certain it was an ICL machine we were using, but the language remains a mystery. I suspect it was something simple concocted up for the schools computer project, possibly a BASIC like langauge.

Arthur Beesley

BBDBB wrote: »

would anyone like a go on my Jet Set Willy?

Jet Set Gertie, FTW.

Badly Drunk Boy

Birroc wrote: »

Why did you need an alias back then?

Why wouldn't you have an alias? Why do you have one now?

I got my first two e-mail accounts when I started college in 1990. One had my name because it was generated by the university, and the second I could choose myself.

I just googled it and got loads of hits, mainly from music and telly newsgroups.

Freddie Dodge

We had a computer in the house in 1984. I find this amazing today given that where I come from we got electricity in 1978, when I was 5. Fairly unique situations both of them.

NIMAN

Played REVS on the BBC Micro.

dxhound2005

Freddie Dodge wrote: »

We had a computer in the house in 1984. I find this amazing today given that where I come from we got electricity in 1978, when I was 5. Fairly unique situations both of them.

Fairly unique does not compute.

ceadaoin.

In primary school we had one of those BBC computers and got to play a game called Granny's Garden about once every 3 months. Loved that game.

Computer class in secondary school in the mid 90s consisted of typing up fake letters and using mail merge. No internet

Frosty McSnowballs

Oregan Trail ftw!

With all these dead rabbits, my family won't starve and die.

Archeron

ceadaoin. wrote: »

In primary school we had one of those BBC computers and got to play a game called Granny's Garden about once every 3 months. Loved that game.

Computer class in secondary school in the mid 90s consisted of typing up fake letters and using mail merge. No internet

Haha, I remember grannies garden. The whole class bunched around one computer while one student typed in the command. Only to be killed by a witch

I also remember an "art" programme in which the cursor was called turtle. You would type turtle 50 and it would draw a line. I thought it s funny one day to type turtle 10000000 and watch as it drew bazillions of lines up and down the screen. Then the teacher made me stay back until it was finished. It took fooking hours.

anncoates

Had an Atari 800XL in the house in the early to mid 80s. The games had to loaded via a tape player and had to sit there listening to this fax type sound as it loaded. Remember a game called New York City and also had Spy Hunter.

Earliest I was on computers on college was about 89 or 90. Only game was a version of Tetris (with the view above the blocks as opposed to platform) and then a few years later, Castle Wolfenstein and Doom.

harry Bailey esq

i got a commodore 64 for Christmas around 90/91,never used it for anything apart from games.Flimbos quest was a favourite of mine back then.Happy times

Stavros Murphy

We got a BBC Micro, model B in 1981 as my old one reckon they were the future and wanted us to be ahead of the curve. Sadly, I was better suited to chopping wood using my head and all it got used for was playing games, and even they were of as much interest to the sisters as a stone mattress. I remember it was £399.00 for the computer itself- a fortune. I wanted a Raleigh Burner, never mind your bleedin computer. It was the same story with a driving licence, which none of our family had ever had - I was in there on the dot of 17 doing my test. My ma was a believer in being an early adopter, and we were adopting stuff, like it or not.

RayCon

BBC Micro ... a game where you had to manage the crops and maintain the flood defences of a village to keep the villagers alive. Seasons would pass and floods and famines would occur..... can't remember the name

FatherTed

Was in secondary school in the mid 80s in Galway and Digital had set up a network between all the secondary schools. So yes we were able to message and "chat" with the other schools on the old Digital VT 52 and VT100 terminals.

ceadaoin.

Archeron wrote: »

Haha, I remember grannies garden. The whole class bunched around one computer while one student typed in the command. Only to be killed by a witch

I also remember an "art" programme in which the cursor was called turtle. You would type turtle 50 and it would draw a line. I thought it s funny one day to type turtle 10000000 and watch as it drew bazillions of lines up and down the screen. Then the teacher made me stay back until it was finished. It took fooking hours.

Ha yes the witch, how did I forget about that. Obviously it was too traumatic for my young mind!

Just googled it, it looks like teletext but probably advanced for its day

http://m.pcgamer.com/2011/01/22/crap-shoot-grannys-garden/

DainBramage

TheNumpty wrote: »

Making designs in Logo on the BBC micro computers

My school also had a few BBC Micros. We were occasionally allowed to use them to play a game called 'grannys garden'.:)

I remember the 'computer room' was specially fitted with a steel door complete with several massive dead-bolts to protect this highly valuable equipment.

DainBramage

ceadaoin. wrote: »

In primary school we had one of those BBC computers and got to play a game called Granny's Garden about once every 3 months. Loved that game.

Computer class in secondary school in the mid 90s consisted of typing up fake letters and using mail merge. No internet

just noticed your comment, also played this game:)

bumper234

I remember when my older brother got a digital watch that played the James Bond theme and i thought that was cool. Later he got a watch with a calculator and i thought that was cool.... when he got a walkman (google it you young ****ers).i thought this was the dogs bollix and the world was soooooooo cool..

Nforce

Played Harrier Attack on the C64 in my school, and ran useless short code having input data for what seemed like hours. Thought I was the shiz with my Texaco freebee radio watch too!

Titzon Toast

Titzon Toast wrote: »

1989/90 I think it would have been for me. Something called logos or something similar, where you drew pictures by giving commands to a little icon on the screen telling in to "turn 90 degrees and move forward ten steps and then stop" to draw yourself a little house.
Exciting times!

I remember that!

Archeron wrote: »

Haha, I remember grannies garden. The whole class bunched around one computer while one student typed in the command. Only to be killed by a witch

I also remember an "art" programme in which the cursor was called turtle. You would type turtle 50 and it would draw a line. I thought it s funny one day to type turtle 10000000 and watch as it drew bazillions of lines up and down the screen. Then the teacher made me stay back until it was finished. It took fooking hours.

And those! :eek: