Retro computers used in Irish schools?

Early 80's, Comprehensive school in North Dublin, around 400-500 students. One Apple II in the library. Never used. By anyone. Ever.

In first year in 1982, we had one 'class' when our tutor booted it up and had to play 'hunt and peck' on the keyboard to try and get a program to run.

By 1985, a few of us had Speccies and C64s and home and some were pretty adept in writing Z80 Assembly code.

We had a good few 8 bits in my secondary school rural Cork (barely had an abacas in primary). Had a small computer room with Apple II's, TRS-80s, VIC-20 and a few C64s. The gangs of us that got the early buses had an hour in the mornings to use them, mostly for games on the C64s.

Few years later they introduced a computer sessions as part of science class (I think) and we got BBC Micros to learn BASIC on.

I do remember one of the teachers bring his UK101 for us to look as well.

Did anyone else have insane security on their computer room in primary school or was Bray just particularly bad back in the early 90s? 😂

It was a completely barred off cage like a prison with a big locked gate on the front. Nobody was getting in (or out!) without the keys.

Na, same in my secondary school - door locked when room not in use. Reminded me that only 1st years had a set class using the (limited) computers at the time and then there was a handful of 'A1' students (I was very far away from the A 'band') could get the keys to tinker around in their off time. Complete discrimination! I remember asking when PCs arrived when I'd get a chance to use them and was told quite bluntly that I wouldn't.

We had a mix of bbc micro and amstrad pcw9512.

On the amstrad we played "Dr logo". You drew pictures using commands like

PD (pen down)

FD 100 (forward 100 pixles to draw a line).

Big manual on the table to learn all the commands.

On the bbc we played a game where you had to solve riddles to collect dragons teeth. I'd love to play that again if anyone can remember the name of the game??

Yeah likewise, I had a PC hand me down from my uncle's courier business as my 'First PC' but I couldn't do anything with it other than word process in whatever the software they used to log their business calls. Have zero recollection of what the computer actually was unfortunately! It used older 5 1/4 inch floppy disks which I thought were quite the novelty at the time.

In primary school we’d an acorn in third class, I only remember it being turned on maybe once and never getting a shot of it but do remember thinking it was pretty primitive compared to my ZX spectrum 48k.

in secondary school I remember when windows 95 came out and the maths teachers were tasted with teaching computers once/week. I had been a MS Dos gamer a good few years at this stage and had multiple PCs from 8086s to 486s, so understood how to use net send commands, change the background.jpg and the boot.bmp files on other machines in the classroom, the teachers default was to restart the computers when things didn’t work for him or when is usual messages appeared on the screen, which was every couple of minutes and let’s just say some questionable images were appearing on all the PCs and I was made to sit in the centre of the room away from the computers for future lab classes, it didn’t last long, maybe 3 weeks until computer class was abandoned, nothing to do with me just the teachers couldn’t teach what they didn’t know themselves.

We never had anything in National School, but in Secondary School we had the previously mentioned separate small building with some BBC Micros and others i cant remmeber.

Generally we were just using a typing tutor, shame as the building was then locked , shame.

RM Nimbus (https://www.thenimbus.co.uk/range-of-nimbus-computers) I think in 1990. We had two with colour and the rest were green!

We had a BBC Micro 128k in the local library with a very limited selection of 'educational' games - I don't know how the 5 1/4 in floppies survived with all those fingerprints on them. They made using the microfiche scanners beside the computers seem exciting.

CD-ROM on a network - that must have been slow!

I remember looking at some of my father's programming guides which covered the BBC and Spectrum, you know then ones where you'd type in the program off the page and then have to wait for next month's update to correct whatever bug you encountered - and the Spectrum had all of those funny boxes in the commands like: echo <square box> <stairs left> <blank square> <filled-in square> <stairs right>. It made for interesting looking commands, but hell, how did that work!!??

Hey - ha! That's it! 150kB/sec was in my mind when I was typing that! And it was INPUT magazine too!

You must be my digital-twin! 🤣