|
Phanatic posted:My only “computer science” class in grade school was a course in Logo in like 1980 or 1981 so not hugely obsolete. Same but it was 1989 lol. That was the one with the turtle cursor, right?
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 03:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 20:25 |
|
|
We never had "computer science" at the school I went to in the UK; it was always "information technology" and it was a single half hour class that happened once a week. The computers were all RiscPCs that they had bought at launch (1994) at great expense – like, they had easily a hundred of the loving things spread out over two computer labs and the library, plus one in every classroom – so for my first few years at that school I was taught to computer on an already extremely dead and niche platform. In 2002-2003 they finally replaced them all with windows XP machines and got set up with a network + internet, as well as this insanely janky "cutting edge" maths tutoring programme with an eye-wateringly expensive educational license. I can't find any screenshots of the version from back then but it ran in full screen, had a keyboard-only interface, and looked like a BIOS menu. Part of the license scheme allowed the school to sell copies on to parents for home use for something insane like £200 and I remember thinking it seemed like a blatant grift even when I was 12. I wish I knew what they did with all of those Acorn machines, because the RiscOS preservation scene seems pretty threadbare. Looks like most of the edutainment games I remember from that era have never been archived and uploaded anywhere and that makes me kinda sad tbh
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 05:07
|
|
|
We learned touch typing, then moved on to longer typing assignments in Microsoft Works in 7th grade. Same class also taught us BASIC. The computers were some kind of cheap, IBM model that I seem to remember was one single unit combining monitor and disk drive. Black and white display. I had one at home, too, as my parents taught and it was pretty cheap if bought through the school system. Didn't use it too long. It was way obsolete in a hurry and the only programs we really had were a multi-pac of games on 3.5 floppies by a company called Advantage Computing.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 06:09
|
|
|
This thread is full of the classical type of goon, and I can appreciate that.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 10:24
|
|
|
Pretty good posted:We never had "computer science" at the school I went to in the UK; it was always "information technology" and it was a single half hour class that happened once a week. The computers were all RiscPCs that they had bought at launch (1994) at great expense – like, they had easily a hundred of the loving things spread out over two computer labs and the library, plus one in every classroom – so for my first few years at that school I was taught to computer on an already extremely dead and niche platform. In 2002-2003 they finally replaced them all with windows XP machines and got set up with a network + internet, as well as this insanely janky "cutting edge" maths tutoring programme with an eye-wateringly expensive educational license. I can't find any screenshots of the version from back then but it ran in full screen, had a keyboard-only interface, and looked like a BIOS menu. Part of the license scheme allowed the school to sell copies on to parents for home use for something insane like £200 and I remember thinking it seemed like a blatant grift even when I was 12. yeah in holland it was also called "information science" or something
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 10:32
|
|
|
It was Information Technology at my (UK) school, on some baffling over-engineered setup of networked BBC Masters until at least 1992. I don't remember much apart from learning whatever spreadsheet and word processor were on them and managing to complete Granny's Garden one wet lunchtime. Showing foresight, they then jumped straight to PCs. Where we did nothing but learn Word and Excel and play gorillas.bas (because the homebrew ID/password system on them would drop you back to a DOS prompt if you deliberately gave it bad credentials. Hacking the gibson)
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 10:47
|
|
|
Information Technology at my UK secondary school, I think it was just called 'Computers' at primary school. Primary school (mid to late 90s) had probably those same Acorns poster above mentioned. We had a lesson every other week in year 5 and 6 in there doing work for another subject, either an edutainment game or typing up a report. Before that it was a BBC Micro in the corner of some of the classrooms that you could play if you were really good, I only remember Granny's Garden. Secondary school was win 9x PCs on a network. One of the older kids showed us how to install Napster when they was a thing and we all spent a few pleasant lunchtimes setting it up and downloading our favourite songs to play. Over and over because no-one knew where they were saved until the whole network crashed due to lack of drive space and presumably hundreds of viruses. Fun times.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 12:33
|
|
|
Pretty good posted:I wish I knew what they did with all of those Acorn machines, because the RiscOS preservation scene seems pretty threadbare. Looks like most of the edutainment games I remember from that era have never been archived and uploaded anywhere and that makes me kinda sad tbh It's weird how some things just slip through the cracks. Every BBC Micro program ever written is online somewhere, but if you want something for the Archimedes or the RM Nimbus then you're completely out of luck unless someone happened to put in on their personal website 20+ years ago and the site somehow still exists. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 18:59 on Mar 27, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 12:51
|
|
|
Acorn computers are intensely fascinating to me because they are so little known and weird, moreso outside the UK. I would love to have an Archimedes box around to dick around with. It's a fun bit of poetic justice that ARM beat everyone in the end; every smartphone and new M1 Apple is basically a tiny Acorn Archimedes 
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 13:02
|
|
|
Iron Prince posted:This thread is full of the classical type of goon, and I can appreciate that. My uni was testing Wifi when CSIRO was still working on it. And I acquired access. Wireless netsend spam campus wide was fun.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 14:05
|
|
|
Born in 83, in Junior High we had typing classes. Don't recall too much about them, but I do remember learning LOGO. That Turtle was fun! And then in High School, a joke of a class/teacher where it was " Here is how to use Powerpoint and Word, and how to defrag a hard drive" Boy, those Powerpoint skills sure have came in handy!
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 15:57
|
|
|
In mid-90's former East-Germany, we learned decent programming in Turbo Pascal from a competent guy. It was a pretty good class and I enjoyed it, but it lacked networking or really anything past the fundamentals.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 15:59
|
|
|
Sweevo posted:and if they made me write about the difference between ROM and RAM one more time I was going to kill myself. And here we are all these years later, and cellphone feature descriptions commonly screw it up. Like if a phone has "4GB RAM, 64GB ROM". User-writable storage is not ROM! 
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 17:37
|
|
|
You got the girls attention with a 85wpm typing skill, I'll tell you that 
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 18:15
|
|
|
   https://twitter.com/yesterdaysprint/status/1375085904771969028?s=20
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 18:33
|
|
|
Pretty good posted:We never had "computer science" at the school I went to in the UK; it was always "information technology" and it was a single half hour class that happened once a week. The computers were all RiscPCs that they had bought at launch (1994) at great expense – like, they had easily a hundred of the loving things spread out over two computer labs and the library, plus one in every classroom – so for my first few years at that school I was taught to computer on an already extremely dead and niche platform. In 2002-2003 they finally replaced them all with windows XP machines and got set up with a network + internet, as well as this insanely janky "cutting edge" maths tutoring programme with an eye-wateringly expensive educational license. I can't find any screenshots of the version from back then but it ran in full screen, had a keyboard-only interface, and looked like a BIOS menu. Part of the license scheme allowed the school to sell copies on to parents for home use for something insane like £200 and I remember thinking it seemed like a blatant grift even when I was 12. There's a guy at the company I work for that has a whole rack of riscos machines hooked up through this crazy kvm. He's part of a group who's put together a bunch of raspberry pi clusters to provide essentially a weird riscos cloud platform that you can buy time on for your retrocomputing needs. It's goofy as hell and I kinda love it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 18:38
|
|
|
I've been wondering if the Quanons would believe it if I started a site detailing how Elon Musk was a Martian Lizardperson whose goal in colonizing Mars would be to dupe earthlings and send reptilian infiltrators in to territory the Earth.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 18:40
|
|
|
His goal is to dupe Earthlings to go to Mars to become his slaves.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 18:52
|
|
|
SavageMessiah posted:There's a guy at the company I work for that has a whole rack of riscos machines hooked up through this crazy kvm. He's part of a group who's put together a bunch of raspberry pi clusters to provide essentially a weird riscos cloud platform that you can buy time on for your retrocomputing needs. It's goofy as hell and I kinda love it. Ha, that's neat. In college (2005 or so?) my parallel computing course was run off of a machine that apparently was a huge cluster of 286 processors or something. Never saw it myself in person, now I wish I had. We would log into a shell on it, write our programs in the text mode editor, run 'em, and that was how we did assignments.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2021 19:10
|
|
|
Plinkey posted:we had to take typing class in middle school, either 6th or 7th grade on something like these things: At my school they tried to teach us touch typing without looking at the screen by using blue cardboard box things to cover your hands, and if you looked at the keyboard too much anyway they’d swap the box for a black plastic cover that obscured the letters. The joke was on them though, my 80WPM+ hunt and peck style was always faster than anyone else, and the only reason I look at the keyboard is to make sure my hands are in the right place. Annoyed my typing teachers to no end that I was still able to succeed while ignoring everything they taught me.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2021 03:40
|
|
|
Maybe my imagination is just poo poo, but I'm not sure how you use cardboard to cover your hands without also covering the keyboard. Why are there two stages of covering? Is blue cardboard less opaque than black plastic?
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2021 06:42
|
|
|
Are we doing geriatric reminiscing about computer classes? I was doing technerdy stuff like installing linux, making websites in .TXT, and I didn't want to gently caress with our computer classes. They thought it was important to learn something called microsoft access. What the hell even is it? I still don't know. Visual basic. No thanks. The teacher wore a quite accurate star trek leotard for halloween, which she was surprisingly fit enough to pull off, but the whimsy of it only served to draw emphatic lines around her gray, humorless form. The king computernerd classmate, with a fetish for SCSI and dumb terminals, had a Dexter's lab in his house, mostly things thrown out from his dad's tech company job.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2021 08:05
|
|
|
We spent a whole term learning Microsoft Frontpage in 2002 or 2003 
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2021 08:45
|
|
|
My brother was that king computernerd of the school. He made my elementary school's first website, and even when he left elementary school he was asked to return a few times to update things. The most amazing thing is that in the year 2000(ish) we had a private network with 4 pcs connected to it. An ancient Trust 386sx, a just old 486, some pentium clone with 100ish mhz processor and some grey box that had 200mhz one. All using proprietary HP network cards and a bigass HP hub, that were not used anymore at the factory where my dad worked as sysadmin. He had a great boss, who was very reasonable if it came down to using unused company property at home. As long as it went out the door with a wiped HDD, a lot was allowed. As one of the first at my school, i had a personal laptop because we could essentially borrow all >5 year old laptops from the company for as long as we wanted. Toshiba Satellite 460 or 490, they were truly great machines and lasted forever. All except the 386 could run Doom (well, it actually could, but at like 3fps - it was amazing it started at all), so many days were spent doing doom death match stuff. We even did some GTA 1 multiplayer but that was apparently very laggy. I guess that all was around the year 2000. Me and a classmate were the first to learn typing at elementary school. One year after us, the rest of the school started. I remember the War on Terrorism games on Newgrounds, downloading tons of stuff from https://www.dosgames.com and music from mp3top40.nl until my allotted profile space ran out... Also spent a lot of time chatting on MSN with classmates and other friends at school. Most things worked well, but the absolute worst thing was that after every reboot, you had to re-install Macromedia Shockwave again. Idk why that was wiped every time on shutdown. So the first 10 minutes of a lesson was filled with the slow booting up of the PCs at the time, and installing Shockwave. My elementary school was quite good at teaching us working with PCs, though i already knew most things because of the stuff we did at home. We had a lot of freedom. This was before child protection on the internet. It was so different from today. In high school, which for me started around 2004ish, i think at first the network was fairly badly locked down. I vaguely remember people playing Quake and such, but that stopped quite soon after i got there. Also the big 'WE WILL CALL THE POLICE IF SOMEONE HACKS OUR NETWORK AGAIN, THIS IS A VERY SERIOUS CRIME' threats. By now, the school has gotten rid of all computers for common use, and everyone uses their own laptop. The computer education stuff we got there was not very memorable. It was just fine, adequately training us for the stuff you do in the average company. The computer sciences people of course got a bit more in depth training. LimaBiker has a new favorite as of 13:14 on Mar 28, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2021 13:04
|
|
|
Edit fail. Sorry!
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2021 13:12
|
|
|
i was asked by the local football hooligan chapter to build a website for them (one of their members' sons was my friend), i made it in homestead because i didnt actually know how to code anything, it was just a bunch of skulls and pictures of bald men with their eyes covered by black bars for anonimity beating up their rivals
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2021 13:51
|
|
|
Konstantin posted:Baseball parents do the opposite today and train their sons to be left-handed or ambidextrous to give them an edge in Little League. My mom is naturally left handed but was told to always use her right back in the 50's. Once she got into her her 40's, she started playing softball left handed and was much better. She does everything left handed except for writing now. A classmate of mine in HS threw right handed but batted left. He also played hockey left. Handedness can be weird.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2021 15:51
|
|
|
Dick Trauma posted:But how can I maintain my perfectly waxed mustache when I must consume endless cups of hot tea? Time is a circle  I've got one of these sitting in a kitchen drawer that someone sent me.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2021 16:09
|
|
|
Apparently I drink tea left handed. My right hand is for mousing.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2021 16:15
|
|
|
LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER makes music with... stuff. This video showcases a vintage chart recorder and he shows a lot of the neat mechatronics in it. He then uses it with music because that's his thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sITroUWbhk8
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2021 21:29
|
|
|
Inspector 34 posted:Maybe my imagination is just poo poo, but I'm not sure how you use cardboard to cover your hands without also covering the keyboard. Why are there two stages of covering? Is blue cardboard less opaque than black plastic? You can lean back to look under the cardboard or just shuffle the box a bit further back and try to get away with looking. Eventually I just started asking for the black rubber cover to start with and save us all the hassle.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2021 00:08
|
|
|
Nowadays you can just get blank keycaps.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2021 00:14
|
|
|
mostlygray posted:A classmate of mine in HS threw right handed but batted left. He also played hockey left. Handedness can be weird. Very weird! My Dad is a righty, but he can bat both left and right handed playing cricket, while I'm a lefty who bats right handed and plays guitar left handed.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2021 00:21
|
|
|
Hockey handedness isn’t that weird. I wrote predominantly left and shoot right. In the US that’s weird but in Canada it’s normal. US normally goes dominant hand low on a hockey stick (a holdover from playing golf and baseball) while Canada goes dominant hand high.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2021 01:23
|
|
|
mostlygray posted:Handedness can be weird. Ringo Starr said his grandmother did not like his left-handedness and that's why he plays drums right-handed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98_gMcma9hY
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2021 01:39
|
|
|
Chemmy posted:Hockey handedness isn’t that weird. I wrote predominantly left and shoot right. In the US that’s weird but in Canada it’s normal. US normally goes dominant hand low on a hockey stick (a holdover from playing golf and baseball) while Canada goes dominant hand high. I played ice-hockey left-handed because my mum bought me a left-handed stick  (I'm right-handed.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2021 10:44
|
|
|
That’s normal handedness in Canada and backwards in the US.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2021 16:29
|
|
|
Mister Kingdom posted:Ringo Starr said his grandmother did not like his left-handedness and that's why he plays drums right-handed. This is pretty common, a lot of lefty drummers play a right-hand kit. A lot of the best righty drummers at least practice on a left-hand kit as well, trying to build ambidexterity.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2021 22:10
|
|
|
Pretty good posted:We spent a whole term learning Microsoft Frontpage in 2002 or 2003 I was the UX designer on FP 2000 so hopefully it was better when you had to learn it We had a computer lab in high school in the early 80s that was several Apple IIs No gaming allowed so everyone just played text based Infocom games because it looked like you were doing something productive
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2021 03:12
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 20:25 |
|
|
https://twitter.com/MrGervaisWrites/status/1377048176830517256 https://twitter.com/MrGervaisWrites/status/1377048932384051204
|
|
#
?
Mar 31, 2021 07:24
|
|
