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DicktheCat posted:At my middle school, we had a laserdisc player in one of the science labs. It was decrepit and sometimes skipped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnsizkVjGm8
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Aug 14, 2019 03:31
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Dr. Quarex posted:This post strikes me as particularly sad, as I feel like I am now also in that classroom, though this does give the thread another chance to revisit this Hoooly poo poo lmao
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Aug 14, 2019 04:01
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It was a gag, luckily.
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Aug 14, 2019 04:40
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divabot posted:no joke i want to get Word 5.1a for Mac running on my Linux box, see how rose-tinted my nostalgia for it is if i try to use it in 2019 This reminds me of learning to use who knows what word processing program in probably 2-3rd grade when you loaded up the actual word processing software from a floppy and then when you wanted to spell check you had to insert another disk because the dictionary was too large to be contained on the same disk as the actual word processing software. Also I wrote some paper using word perfect or something like that around 5th grade, but we didn't have the spell checking disk/add-on or whatever (this would have been around windows 3.11 or so) and I got so upset because I couldn't spell check it, and for some reason couldn't copy/paste it into whatever program we had that did have a spellcheck, that I went to bed crying and my mom proof read it for me. For me remembering it, it seemed like hours and hours of work to check it but I'm pretty sure looking back that it was maybe 3-4 pages at the most and my mom probably did it in like 15 minutes to a half hour tops.
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Aug 14, 2019 07:09
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Plinkey posted:This reminds me of learning to use who knows what word processing program in probably 2-3rd grade when you loaded up the actual word processing software from a floppy and then when you wanted to spell check you had to insert another disk because the dictionary was too large to be contained on the same disk as the actual word processing software. I wrote a bunch of papers on our Commodore 64 - can't remember if it had spellcheck or not. Spellcheck has always been mostly helpful for me to catch typos - my spelling is almost perfect and a lot of the time I have something underlined it is because spellcheck is dumb and doesn't like the spelling I am using (like "judgement"). My most common errors are errors of omission, and there isn't really a check for that. Over-reliance on spellcheck is something I blame for the atrocious writing we see in a lot of news nowadays, in addition to corporate vampires drying up the resources needed to properly staff newspapers and the like.
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Aug 14, 2019 07:20
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CaptainSarcastic posted:I wrote a bunch of papers on our Commodore 64 - can't remember if it had spellcheck or not. The first one would have probably been an Apple IIE in the elementary school computer lab, and the second was some rando built 386 we had at home. Never had a Commador 64.
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Aug 14, 2019 07:23
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I wrote papers using Wordstar in high school on the family PC And used Lotus 123 at my after school job doing inventory Word and Excel were not dominant until 1994 or so
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Aug 14, 2019 07:58
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Even then it was a toss up between Word and Word Perfect.
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Aug 14, 2019 08:04
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I think George RR Martin still writes with Wordstar, actually
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Aug 14, 2019 08:16
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Coffee And Pie posted:I think George RR Martin still writes I’m going to stop you right there.
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Aug 14, 2019 09:01
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I was still bumping into companies using Lotus Notes for email and not Exchange in like, tyool 2013. It was bizarre
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Aug 14, 2019 13:12
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The company I left last year still used Lotus Notes for everything. The server would stop working every night from midnight to 6 AM and nobody could be bothered to figure out why, so if you were on night shift like me you just didn't have email. We also had to do our timecards on VT320 terminals. The early 80s software they were using had no concept of minutes, so we got paid by the hundredth of an hour.
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Aug 14, 2019 13:25
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welcome to the metric hour!
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Aug 14, 2019 13:35
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A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:The company I left last year still used Lotus Notes for everything. The server would stop working every night from midnight to 6 AM and nobody could be bothered to figure out why, so if you were on night shift like me you just didn't have email.
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Aug 14, 2019 14:26
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A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:The company I left last year still used Lotus Notes for everything. The server would stop working every night from midnight to 6 AM and nobody could be bothered to figure out why, so if you were on night shift like me you just didn't have email. When I worked for GE Healthcare we made timekeeping software that fell into my portfolio and it had options for either minutes, or decimal hours. The reason we had that option? Our biggest enterprise customer had some arcane payroll software that required decimal hours instead of minutes. Even at GE Healthcare, when your biggest customer wants something, you do it It was insane and bizzare, and made troubleshooting time rules for them a brain breaking nightmare, because literally every other client used minutes.
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Aug 14, 2019 14:28
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We use HP PPM for project tracking and time registration, and it still uses decimal hours. What a piece of poo poo, for this and many other reasons.
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Aug 14, 2019 15:33
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:When I worked for GE Healthcare we made timekeeping software that fell into my portfolio and it had options for either minutes, or decimal hours. The reason we had that option? Our biggest enterprise customer had some arcane payroll software that required decimal hours instead of minutes. Even at GE Healthcare, when your biggest customer wants something, you do it Honestly, I think I would've pitched a random number generator for values between 0 and 1 and just appended that to the hours total. It couldn't have possibly mattered.
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Aug 14, 2019 15:42
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So the US throws a hissy fit when anyone suggests getting on with the program and switching to metric... only to use metric hours? Somehow this is perfectly on brand
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Aug 14, 2019 15:45
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Keith Atherton posted:I wrote papers using Wordstar in high school on the family PC To save your document and exit was ^K D. To save and continue where you were was ^K S ^Q P. Why do I remember this?
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Aug 14, 2019 16:48
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CaptainSarcastic posted:I wrote a bunch of papers on our Commodore 64 - can't remember if it had spellcheck or not. Not until GEOS.
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Aug 14, 2019 19:01
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I saw something about a concert (from a long time ago) and a word popped into my head which I haven't heard in a long time: simulcast. I remember when a music concert would be on TV, and they'd also play it on FM radio so you could turn down the TV and listen to it in  stereo through probably much better speakers.I think they'd advertise by saying "simulcast in FM stereo" with lots of sound effects. Apparently the term is still used but obviously not for that!
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Aug 15, 2019 07:07
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Buttcoin purse posted:I saw something about a concert (from a long time ago) and a word popped into my head which I haven't heard in a long time: simulcast. I remember when a music concert would be on TV, and they'd also play it on FM radio so you could turn down the TV and listen to it in I remember one of the New York stations doing that but with 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was pretty cool. Musta been around 1983 or so.
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Aug 15, 2019 07:33
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:When I worked for GE Healthcare we made timekeeping software that fell into my portfolio and it had options for either minutes, or decimal hours. The reason we had that option? Our biggest enterprise customer had some arcane payroll software that required decimal hours instead of minutes. Even at GE Healthcare, when your biggest customer wants something, you do it Time and motion studies use hundredths of a minute because back in the day that made it easier to crunch the numbers. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 09:35 on Aug 15, 2019 |
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Aug 15, 2019 09:31
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Plinkey posted:The first one would have probably been an Apple IIE in the elementary school computer lab My primary school had two of those on wheeled carts that would be moved around to the classrooms as needed, they kept on using those well into the nineties. A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:We also had to do our timecards on VT320 terminals. The early 80s software they were using had no concept of minutes, so we got paid by the hundredth of an hour. One of my employer's biggest clients is a bit like that, so we ended up working around the problem by just billing in six minute increments. Bargearse has a new favorite as of 10:30 on Aug 15, 2019 |
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Aug 15, 2019 10:19
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It's pretty useless to get a desktop nowadays (unless it's for specialized use like editing, design, show control, etc). So all the kidputers are laptops that come in rolling lockable carts with time-delay chargers so you don't destroy the batteries. What sucks is when a teacher blocks out a whole day of computer use for their classes. Those shits run for like 3 hours then need a recharge. Doesn't get you through the day.
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Aug 15, 2019 10:23
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FilthyImp posted:It's pretty useless to get a desktop nowadays (unless it's for specialized use like editing, design, show control, etc). So all the kidputers are laptops that come in rolling lockable carts with time-delay chargers so you don't destroy the batteries. At most of the schools I've worked at, they're either all Lenovo 11e laptops with a Department of Education custom image or iPads in rugged cases, but ChromeOS devices are really starting to catch on in Australian schools.
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Aug 15, 2019 10:32
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A friend of mine is the IT guy for a school district, and he's responsible for speccing/building/maintaining all the ruggedized iPads. They have these industrial-grade cases that he was sure were indestructible. He's made videos of himself hucking them off the roof of the school, like 30 feet up, or down the stairwell, and showing them undamaged after. Two weeks later he'll have a room full of smashed screens, as though the cases had never existed.
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Aug 15, 2019 12:19
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Guaranteed. Every iPad that goes into my schools gets STM Dux cases at the very least, and fully ruggedised cases if the budget will allow for it. Even so, I get at least a few back with smashed screens.
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Aug 15, 2019 12:36
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Data Graham posted:A friend of mine is the IT guy for a school district, and he's responsible for speccing/building/maintaining all the ruggedized iPads. They have these industrial-grade cases that he was sure were indestructible. He's made videos of himself hucking them off the roof of the school, like 30 feet up, or down the stairwell, and showing them undamaged after. As a parent of two children that I love, kids are idiots when it come to electronics. If anything, I sometimes wonder if that same phenomenon of how football players wearing gear makes them more likely to take risks applies when it comes to kids and devices. Fake edit: my son has a Switch that is literally held together with electrical tape. Incredibly, it still works just fine, but it ain’t pretty up close.
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Aug 15, 2019 15:57
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Bargearse posted:ChromeOS devices are really starting to catch on in Australian schools. Early on they were aiming for an almost 1:1 Macbook:Student ratio and then realized that's locking into a 4-5 year refresh cycle and no one wanted to drop that kind of cash. Chromebooks tho? Cheap as poo poo and good enough.
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Aug 15, 2019 18:35
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Holy poo poo, one-to-one MacBooks would be absurdly expensive, costly to replace when the kids inevitably break them and not really have any advantages over cheaper devices. Chromebooks do the job just fine at a fraction of the price. Last time I looked at the breakdown of school IT resources in my state was 30% Apple, 60% Windows, and 10% ChromeOS, and they’re expecting that to double next year.
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Aug 16, 2019 01:25
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Bargearse posted:Holy poo poo, one-to-one MacBooks would be absurdly expensive, costly to replace when the kids inevitably break them and not really have any advantages over cheaper devices. Chromebooks do the job just fine at a fraction of the price. Also probably why you don't have a teacher that's an avowed Mac Fanperson be your IT Department....
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Aug 16, 2019 01:31
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That's one of the reasons the Department of Education around here started a program to get each school a tech guy from an actual IT service provider. There are still a few Mac cultists around but for the most part, the prevailing attitude is to just use whatever is best for the job, so most schools have iPads for younger students, a Mac to manage them with, maybe one or two for the performing arts classes and that's about it.
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Aug 16, 2019 02:25
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Bargearse posted:That's one of the reasons the Department of Education around here started a program to get each school a tech guy from an actual IT service provider. There are still a few Mac cultists around but for the most part, the prevailing attitude is to just use whatever is best for the job, so most schools have iPads for younger students, a Mac to manage them with, maybe one or two for the performing arts classes and that's about it. When I was in HS everything was mac except some of the computers in the programming/business class labs. Didn't the education market basically keep Apple mostly in the black during the 90-early 00s until everyone started buying iPods/iPads and iPhones? The summer after I graduated I set up probably 500-800 iMacs/Powerbooks/some X servers or whatever they were called, from elementary schools through the high school. The shipping docks were just stacked fully of box after box of apple computers, that was basically my entire job all summer, setting up Macs for like 6-8 hours a day, and sometimes some other simple stuff like running some cat5 or troubleshooting one of the speciality computers like the plotter that was hooked up to some ancient 486 because the special card to run it was ISA or something and probably 15 years old at that point.
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Aug 16, 2019 02:32
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It's all Chromebooks here in the middle and high schools. It's nice that they're easily interchangeable between students.
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Aug 16, 2019 03:09
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Plinkey posted:When I was in HS everything was mac except some of the computers in the programming/business class labs. Didn't the education market basically keep Apple mostly in the black during the 90-early 00s until everyone started buying iPods/iPads and iPhones? That's how it was done here from the mid-80s until about 2005 or so when Apple stopped leaning so heavily on the education market and attitudes in the education world started to change. Apple still has a respectable share of the education market here but not the stranglehold it once had. In other news, my computer room is starting to come together. Haven't set up any of my consoles or my older Commodore stuff just yet but that isn't too far away.  
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Aug 16, 2019 04:05
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SAMTRON, there's a name I haven't seen in a while!
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Aug 16, 2019 04:11
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FilthyImp posted:Same. Ipads are still too expensive and require external keyboards to use well (at least in class settings). And people haaaaate PCs because of windows/updates/whatevers. Getting 5 years out of computers isn't bad at all. Worth the premium in a high damage environment? Probably not without some care plan as 95% of the stuff can be done on something like Chromebook without dealing with Windows. At that point it comes down to damage turn over cost over the same 5 year period and whether the survivors will be too underpowered too soon especially if you brought too cheap. Buying too cheap is also bad if not worse than too much. Too often you will make a recommendation but the idiot will buy the cheapest thing that catches their eye even though they asked you for recommendations because they don't know wtf they are doing. It will be some laptop that was obsolete 5 years ago, have an SSD somehow runs no faster than an HDD, not enough storage to move their existing data over(  now hauling external HDD) the AMD equivalent of a pre-Ryzen Celeron. I poo poo you not it was slower than it's predecessor. You can't give them poo poo because they are your boss, but drat, I had a really good laugh when I got home.
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Aug 16, 2019 04:18
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Buttcoin purse posted:SAMTRON, there's a name I haven't seen in a while! I found that at a school just lying around in their IT office. I used it while setting up their new servers because it was already there and it still worked. That would have been 2017, and the last time I used a CRT for actual work. oohhboy posted:Buying too cheap is also bad if not worse than too much. That's why I like to pitch three options, with the cheapest one being what I actually want.
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Aug 16, 2019 04:26
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Kindergarten through 2nd grade we had an Apple II lab, they had a brand new Windows lab at the end of the year I never saw. Moved to a charter school with a technology focus for 3rd into 6th grade. They had Apple everything, and gave you a Mac Clone to bring home. Back to the old elementary school because the charter school couldn't run a middle school to save their life*. They had a Windows lab still. Middle school had Macs again. High school had Windows XP. *They had a demerit system where if you had 2 or less you got to go to a party at the end of the month. I had 7 my first month there so back to public school I went.
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Aug 16, 2019 05:14
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