1986 film - messaging on computers in high school

Kichote · 27-04-2014 08:47PM

In my day computers ran on steam and struggled to reach 80Hz, youd throw in 2 full bags of coal to get it going and then some finnicky mechanical part would break.

The punch card crowd think they had it bad but our programs were stored on slabs of clay and bits used to break off and you'd have to bake a new slab

Fitz* · 27-04-2014 09:14PM

In 2005, all we got to do was typing excercises.

Luckily, I was fast & could sneak onto Bebo for 15 minutes!

dpofloinn · 27-04-2014 09:52PM

The good old days using an Amstrad computer writing in GW Basic to do simple equations that where faster to do by hand

Jimoslimos · 28-04-2014 03:27AM

There was a BBC micro in my primary school that the technophobe teachers used to regard with suspicion. I remember, bored in class, gazing longingly and wondering if we'd ever get to use it more often than twice a year.

Secondary was the usual touch typing, word processors, spreadsheets and some BASIC programming.

Anyone remember Gorillas. Probably the reason I am now barred from Dublin Zoo.
http://www.kongregate.com/games/moly/gorillas-bas

Irish Guitarist · 28-04-2014 05:59AM

When I was about 14 in 1990 I did two or three computer classes. If I recall correctly they consisted of playing maths games that were designed for 6 or 7 year olds. One of them was a game like Space Invaders. Two numbers and a plus or minus sign flew down and you had to either add or subtract the numbers to 'shoot' them.

A couple of years later I left school and did a FAS course. They 'taught' us computers there too. The stupid old bat woman 'teaching' us read out this program which was something like you would see in a Commodore 64 manual. She read a line of code for us to type and then she paused. I typed what she had said and then pressed 'enter'. She went into hysterics because I had pressed 'enter' before she had told me to. She started screaming at me "what comes next if you're so smart?". From then on I just pressed one key at a time and was bored senseless.

Arthur Beesley · 28-04-2014 07:01AM

Amalgam wrote: »

Did any school actually have the, 'hardware turtle', as opposed to just the software?

See here: http://angrytechnician.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/relic/

We were allowed to play Planetoid! (Defender clone) once in a while, well.. load it, rather than play it, as trouble would break out, soon after loading, to hog the machine..

Turtlehead? Yes. This? No.

the_syco · 28-04-2014 07:08AM

TheNumpty wrote: »

Making designs in Logo on the BBC micro computers

Vague memory of this. There was a room of such computers, and if everyone was in, not everyone would get a computer, so there'd be a few of ye put with someone else.

biketard · 28-04-2014 07:13AM

POKE 23608,150

bnagrrl · 28-04-2014 09:43AM

We played Granny's Garden

jimgoose · 28-04-2014 10:10AM

Logo. And "Beach Head" and "Way Of The Exploding Fist".

Heroditas · 28-04-2014 10:27AM

biketard wrote: »

POKE 23608,150

Very annoying!

Sunglasses Ron · 28-04-2014 10:46AM

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.

Where was that, out of curiosity? I could have sworn the whole countryside was wired up by the late 50's.

Going Strong · 28-04-2014 10:49AM

We had green-screen Tandy computers in school - back about 1982. Awful things with big 5" floppy drives. We were supposed to be learning "Business Computing" with tax assessment programmes etc but I got bored with all that. So, I bought a "Basic Programming" book in Eason and spent my days coding in Blackjack and a couple of arcade-style games instead. I already had a Commodore 64 at home so was well used to typing in reams of code that (mostly) never worked. The teacher told me I'd never get a career out of that sort of thing. He was right too, having terrible maths skills meant a lifetime of "No computers for you." at job interviews.

RoboRat · 28-04-2014 10:50AM

I remember spending 3 days writing code on an amstrad 6128 to play harrier attack and then my father switching the computer off later that day :mad:

Rhys Essien · 28-04-2014 10:57AM

We played Croaker the Frog,Grannys Garden and Dive Bomber.

Going Strong · 28-04-2014 10:58AM

RoboRat wrote: »

I remember spending 3 days writing code on an amstrad 6128 to play harrier attack and then my father switching the computer off later that day :mad:

I bought a magazine full of code that was supposed to create a Dungeons & Dragons game for the Commodore 64 that was claimed to be THE AWESOME! so I was pumped up like mad. Three days of me taking over the telly, typing in code, correcting the myriad of typos on the page, troubleshooting broken syntax strings, following lines and lines of 1,0,0,1,1,0,1 for missing 1s, 0s and commas and.....

Nothing, a blank screen and a &$£~@ing programme that self-deleted itself from the tape deck. My mother came in to see what was wrong when she heard the anguished sobbing.

Heroditas · 28-04-2014 11:21AM

How the heck could something self-delete from a tape????

jimgoose · 28-04-2014 11:27AM

Going Strong wrote: »

We had green-screen Tandy computers in school...

Mmm. Around the same time, a dozen or so Commodore 64 machines each with a little green monochrome monitor, except the one at the teachers desk which had a fairly large (by the standards of the day) colour CBM monitor, as well as a CBM 1541 5 1/4'' floppy-drive. IIRC the "teacher" machine was running some sort of primitive fileserver that made the 1541 available to the rest of the computers via some kind of Star network. There was also an Apple II in the physics lab that didn't get used much.

Going Strong · 28-04-2014 12:33PM

Heroditas wrote: »

How the heck could something self-delete from a tape????

It was over thirty years ago so the old memory (Fnarr!) isn't what it used to be. I *think* it wrote over itself before launching that first time and crashed so no amount of loading would bring back anything other than a blue screen.

Tordelback · 28-04-2014 12:45PM

I love freaking anyone under 40 by telling them how I spent 1990 digitsing maps over a college VAX/VMS system, the results of which I couldn't see at all until they had printed out, which could only take place in a building on the other side of the campus from the terminal I was using, where you would collect your 'job' 15 minutes later as a tightly rolled scroll placed in a pigeon hole by some anonymous techie. At least half the time I would have made some simple error like not closing a polygon, and all that would await me on a 5-foot long roll of paper was a single line running down the left hand side of the page. The deforestation of the Amazon is basically my fault.

Badly Drunk Boy · 28-04-2014 01:23PM

We had a Sinclair Spectrum 48K at home in the mid 80's. One of the free 'games' was a simulation to do with fox and rabbit population. It was great!! It was the programme that Daley Thompson's Decathlon wanted to be...

AllGunsBlazing wrote: »

We had a single computer lab at my secondary school back in the late 80's. C64s to begin with then replaced by a brand called Wang. Yes, we got a good few laughs out of that.

Wang Computers sponsored Oxford United when they were in the top flight of English football in the 80's.

tricky D · 28-04-2014 01:51PM

Still have my VIC20 from the early 80s in the attic in semi-working order last time I checked. My programming abilities haven't improved since then.

My dad used to play around with a HEC4 around 1960 in the Irish Sugar Company. The only games were accounts and payroll, which wasn't much fun.

Going Strong · 28-04-2014 02:01PM

My dad was supposed to be doing various costing jobs but managed to while a way a fair bit of time by playing a "Civilisation" type game on a VAX mainframe in the late '70's to early '80's. Basically you were lord of the manor and had to keep your serf population alive in the face of famine and disease.

I think he found it already on there and was most likely put there by the engineers so they had something to do while waiting for data to turn up or something.

A schoolfriend of mine had an older brother who worked in Apple in Cork back in the early days so the house was crammed with early Macs in various states of repair. They had two of them connected by a cable and we were amazed at being able to 'talk' with one another by typing in messages.

AllGunsBlazing · 28-04-2014 05:14PM

My dad went out and spent the guts of 300 quid on a C64 in 1985. That was a huge amount of money for a family like ours. He rightly figured that these new fangled, typewriter- looking things were the way of the future.

And yep, all we did was play video games on it.:o

Looking back I'm genuinely ashramed of not taking advantage of the opportunity handed to me by both my dad and my school - which had a very well equipped computer room for the time. But there wasn't much of a curriculum in place back then either. The tools were all there but nobody really knew what they were for.

Freddie Dodge · 28-04-2014 08:16PM

Sunglasses Ron wrote: »

Where was that, out of curiosity? I could have sworn the whole countryside was wired up by the late 50's.

You suppose wrong.

This was in south Kerry, and we weren't the last place either. The Black Valley supposedly got power in 1978 according to Wikipedia, but I think it was actually 1980. The last of the offshore Islands which have a population only got power in 2003.

We attended a Vocational school where the principal (an early adopter of electronic typewriters) had fundraised to buy about 12 BBC micros for the school, along with some Macs. (Models may be wrong here, but these ones were present later when I got there post 1986) My elder brother was a quick typist, and thus got to use these earlier than the mainstream classes, I think about 1983.
The following year, he bought a Mitsubitsi, MSX 64? himself for about 299 pounds, - a fortune at the time, and volumes of books on basic, and some other languages.
Us younger siblings copied out lines and lines of code to make a triangle move across the screen or something, and sorta understood what we were doing at the time. Also spent hours upon hours playing Chuckie Egg (which was actually quite good) and some other crap games.
Then he went to do computer applications in NIHE Dublin as DCU was then known, and the rest of us dropped back into the stone age again.

I HATED computers as much as he loved them back then, and it was only fear of being the only illiterate gobshyte left on planet earth which got me interested again around 2005, which was lucky for me as around a year later I was forced to use them for my business. Big bro is still in software.

And it all started with poles and electricity.

kowloon · 28-04-2014 09:15PM

Senor Fancy Pants wrote: »

Oregan Trail ftw!

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

Nostalgia

biketard · 29-04-2014 03:44AM

Badly Drunk Boy wrote: »

Daley Thompson's Decathlon

The ultimate keyboard stress tester.

pharmaton · 29-04-2014 03:54AM

I used to use "computer class" as "cigarette break in the toilets" time.

BeardySi · 29-04-2014 05:05PM

Surreptitiously exchanging Leisure Suit Larry games with your mates....

FanadMan · 30-04-2014 03:38AM

Jimoslimos wrote: »

There was a BBC micro in my primary school that the technophobe teachers used to regard with suspicion. I remember, bored in class, gazing longingly and wondering if we'd ever get to use it more often than twice a year.

Secondary was the usual touch typing, word processors, spreadsheets and some BASIC programming.

Anyone remember Gorillas. Probably the reason I am now barred from Dublin Zoo.
http://www.kongregate.com/games/moly/gorillas-bas

Used to play this and Snake at school. Learned how to edit them so they either wouldn't work properly or never lose

A cousin gave me loads of games to use at school - different golf games, driving games and one called Digger which was great. The teachers loved me for this - they used to play them during lunchtime.

1986 film - messaging on computers in high school

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