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barbecue at the folks posted:Happy 40th birthday Commodore 64 The C64 was huge in Australia, sure there were Apple //es in schools but at homes it was primarily Commodore, with some Atari and Sinclair owners.
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Aug 27, 2022 06:41
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Aug 27, 2022 17:50
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So, instead of realizing that the control layout was bad, they just made a new controller that moved the buttons around to where they should be?
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Aug 27, 2022 18:03
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My elementary school had Laser 128’s, which were apple II clones. By middle school we had ancient for the time Mac SE’s and slightly more modern Color Clasics. High School was all 486 and Pentium Dells
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Aug 27, 2022 18:12
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Please tell me that thing has the user twist the left grip to work the tank controls
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Aug 27, 2022 18:17
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:My elementary school had Laser 128’s This was my home computer from 1989-1996 Jim Silly-Balls posted:High School was all 486 and Pentium Dells My first two years of high school we had ancient IBM 8086 PS-1s. When I was a junior had a lavish new lab with 486SX-25's in it. We hid the install files for Doom II on the Netware server, and would spend lunch periods deathmatching. The best 1996 had to offer, man.
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Aug 27, 2022 18:30
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In my last two years of schooling, the school got a computer lab of around 50 Bondi Blue iMac G3s. They never got used for any classes or anything. We could look through the window of the locked, unlit computer lab and see the rows of iMacs but they were just there for the sake of being there. There were typing classes but that was done in a different room of Macintosh LC IIs.
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Aug 27, 2022 18:46
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Elementary and junior high were a mix of C64s/something else/and DOS-based IBMs. The system got a special on C64s, which were used from not long after their debut until around 1990. That special extended to teachers being allowed to buy them for personal use, which became my first computer. I still have it, too, though I need to get the disk drive repaired. There were still a handful of C64s around in junior high as I remember taking Accelerated Reader tests on them in 6th grade. First grade teachers had C64s, but I don't remember them in any other classrooms except for the computer lab. By the end of elementary school, we'd switched to something I can't identify immediately. They weren't Apple IIs. Color monitors, separate towers. Played a lot of Oregon Trail II and some other explorer game about the Amazon. In 7th and 8th grades we learned BASIC on some IBM DOS machines.
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Aug 27, 2022 19:29
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Middle school was a whole lab full of Atari 400s and 800s (and some 1200xl’s), and a hallowed array of Woz edition Apple IIgs’s
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Aug 27, 2022 20:03
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Also in the US the commodore was sold at toys r us (also RIP) so it was seen more as a toy/hobby thing rather than A Computer. I actually had them in my school rather than apples but that was the exception. Apple owned the EDU market.
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Aug 27, 2022 20:17
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*enters Commodore chat* The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be…..unnatural.
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Aug 27, 2022 20:38
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I'm glad I never learned to type or I'd be horrified no doubt.
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Aug 27, 2022 20:49
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Gonz posted:*enters Commodore chat* Ah, the less known Australian model.
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Aug 27, 2022 20:51
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Gonz posted:*enters Commodore chat* That's a keyboard designed to launch ICBMs in a sci-fi movie.
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Aug 27, 2022 21:52
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Our school district seemed to operate on the time-honored tradition of “whoever was willing to cut the best deal for a tax break” and hand-me-downs in its IT policy. Elementary classrooms had Apple //e machines with DuoDisk drives. Elementary libraries had 486 Compaq Presarios. Our sixth grade was its own school for some unknowable reason, and it seems like they were on their own in terms of computers. Classrooms had random beige box 486s, and the lab was made up of XTs and XT clones. Middle school classrooms had 486 Compaq Presarios, the labs had P2 Dell Optiplexes, and the library had IBM PC 300PLs. High school classrooms were the same as middle school, but the classrooms had been updated to P4 Dell Optiplexes. The labs and library got the same upgrade about halfway-through. The yearbook/newspaper classroom had three Bondi Blue iMacs, and some teachers had old Macs that I think they shadow IT’ed into use. Middle school and up, computers had internet access and were networked with Novell Netware.
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Aug 27, 2022 22:01
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You haven't lived 'til you've waited for a full classroom of diskless RM Nimbus 386s to network boot into windows 3.11 over the cheapest shared connection the 90s could offer up. We were a "not especially rich" school. One of the other labs still used IBM XTs as recently as '98
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Aug 27, 2022 22:10
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Qwijib0 posted:Also in the US the commodore was sold at toys r us (also RIP) so it was seen more as a toy/hobby thing rather than A Computer. I actually had them in my school rather than apples but that was the exception. Apple owned the EDU market.
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Aug 27, 2022 22:49
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an actual frog posted:You haven't lived 'til you've waited for a full classroom of diskless RM Nimbus 386s to network boot into windows 3.11 over the cheapest shared connection the 90s could offer up. Look at mister fancy pants with his Nimbus 386s. My school was Nimbus 186s, and only replaced them the year I left in 1996. The IT class was one hour every other week, and you'd spend 20 minutes waiting for the ~20 computers to remote boot over the network into the DOS-based menu system.
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Aug 28, 2022 00:10
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We had an Apple II lab in elementary school from kindergarten to 2nd grade. I’m guessing they were GSs because I remember them being in color. They got a brand new Windows Lab right at the end of 2nd grade but I never got to use it because I was bundled off to the brand new charter school. Started 3rd grade in ‘97 at the charter school and their big thing was they technology and how they were going to be way bigger on that than public school. They had a bunch of new Macs, Mac clones, and then iMac G3s when those started coming out. They had all these computers but didn’t really know what they were going to do with them teaching wise. About a month into 6th grade I got sent back to public school because charter couldn’t run a middle school to save their lives and my behavior was going to poo poo. Same elementary school as before with Windows 2000 machines. Middle school was iMacs running At Ease. High school was Windows machines running XP. Is the education market using Macs anymore?
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Aug 28, 2022 01:20
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Looks like I already told this story so I'll just quote it.Data Graham posted:Oh I have a Mac LC pizzabox story.
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Aug 28, 2022 02:05
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Casimir Radon posted:Is the education market using Macs anymore? When I worked in the education system, some schools had Macs for their art departments, but mostly it was a mix of Chromebooks, iPads and Windows devices. The Department of Education and Training even provided a Windows 10 based SOE as a .wim file you could bang out over WDS or SCCM. Staff used to have a choice between Mac and Windows laptops, which remained property of the Department and we're regularly replaced in tranches. Tgey eventually took the Mac option away entirely, which led to a fun scenario in which I had to physically take back a Macbook from a teacher who refused to give hers up. Bargearse has a new favorite as of 03:01 on Aug 28, 2022 |
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Aug 28, 2022 02:56
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Casimir Radon posted:Is the education market using Macs anymore? This was done at a time where there were no user profiles or anything of the sort on iPads so it was a complete clusterfuck. Then they found out an assload of kids signing into a test via browser led to the same loving problems every saturated connection has dealt with since the dawn of the internet. And they also learned that composing an essay was hard when your composition screen was the height of a stamp because the ipad keyboard took up so much screen real estate. Currently, school iPads are managed by AirWatch MDM and are pretty locked out as they auto-enroll as a managed device. LAUSD invested part of their coronamoney into buying M1 Mac Air's for teachers. These are also MDM locked to the user account. If a school purchases MacBooks, those are also tied to an MDM and can be a pain to get what you need on there. Desktops are mostly gone. Unl ss you have an actual lab with like animation or design software. It's easier to get your office staff a mid-tier Dell or Lenovo than to budget for an iMac. There is now a program that issues kids in the district a free Chromebook with LTE data plan if requested. Kids keep those until they graduate or whatever. It's far cheaper to get a cart full of $200 Chromebooks than to pony up for a MacBook. You get like 3 MacBook Pro's for what it costs to supply a whole class 30 Chromebooks. A large part of what made Macs appealing has been absolutely savaged by Chromebooks.
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Aug 28, 2022 06:25
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Growing up in the UK I had BBC micro computers for the first couple of years and then Acorn Archimedies until the last 18 months of my school life. Mostly as they were part of the government's IT literacy programme so there was funding and supermarket coupon drives to allow schools to purchase them. I don't recall ever seeing an Apple outside of a museum. Kinda miss those Acorns, the educational software had a lot of point and click style games based off whatever we were learning at the time that I remember being fun. Never really come across those titles preserved for emulation, just the usual consumer games from the time. Finally getting PCs running Windows 98 circa 1999/2000 was fun with a barely functioning network, internet and no security - Anarchy being done by anyone with the slightest knowledge as you can imagine and everyone sending WinPopUp messages constantly to all machines. Took a couple years for the school to hire someone who knew how to lock it all down.
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Aug 28, 2022 09:16
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barbecue at the folks posted:Happy 40th birthday Commodore 64 Bit late on this but I, too, grew up in a Commodore household in the US. I have lots of early memories of things like playing with a terrible software-based voice synthesizer called SAM, playing games like Nonteraqueous, and waiting for the Ghostbusters game to load from disk while the music played. I get the impression now that it was seen as a toy by "serious" computer enthusiasts who were all on Apple IIs then PC clones. My dad started on a VIC-20 his parents bought him for christmas one year and I'm sure it was the price tag that sold it. By the time I was around and old enough to remember, Dad had a couple C64s the floppy drives and the printer and all the accessories and would occasionally log into Compuserve at 300 baud. That whole setup was replaced in the early 90s when it was all very obsolete with an IBM PS/2 model 30 which eventually saw some... unique case mods to hack in an AT clone motherboard.
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Aug 28, 2022 15:49
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I had a Commodore 16 that my parents got for free for listening to an Amway pitch or something. I spent about a week making lovely pixel art in BASIC and then it froze solid and never booted again
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Aug 28, 2022 20:10
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Our school had a lab of about three dozen IBM PS/2 25s, tied on a generic Novell network. This was mostly used as a testing station for our advanced reading program. Although, in seventh grade, a very clever computer science teacher managed to get Windows 3.1 running on the 25s, and taught us ne'er-do-wells DOS 3.3, Lotus 123, Wordperfect, and Windows. This poor little lab lasted until I graduated. In my sixth grade year the elementary got an IBM 486 we shared between the 3rd-6th grade - mostly wound up being used as a Print Shop Pro station for the teachers, and occasionally as a reward for good grades or tests or stuff. The next year was junior high, and I elected to take the TSA class. They had a nicer lab of 486s and early Pentiums they upgraded every year. We had dialup starting my 9th grade year, and then we got a fractional T1 that was in every way worse than dialup was. Somewhere around my 9th grade year was when a friend and I installed Doom 2 on all those computers, and taught the class how to deathmatch - and cue cutting class short every day to deathmatch Doom 2, then Quake, then eventually after I graduated, Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament.
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Aug 28, 2022 20:33
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My Elementary school had TRS-80s with tape drives, and pretty much my whole formal computer education took place there learning to do simple things in BASIC. Years later we had a Commodore 64 at home, then an 8088, then a 286. I remember my high school had vintage Macs with the tiny CRT screen, but I never really used them. I don't really remember touching computers while actually in school between Elementary school and college.
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Aug 28, 2022 21:24
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Between 1990 and 1996, own primary school had a fleet of Apple IIe systems on wheeled carts that they would move around to classrooms as they were needed, then later we got Macs for the library, and eventually a few Pentiums with a single 14.4kbps modem shared on a coax ethernet network. Secondary school, we had a fully switched network with Windows 98 and later Windows XP. Year 10 students all got individual laptops. In around 2002 we got a few Cisco wireless APs with no security at all, the tech office controlled access by being careful who they loaned wireless cards out to. This worked well enough until wireless cards got cheap enough that any nerdy high school kid could afford one.
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Aug 29, 2022 00:48
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I know someone will look at the CRTs and cry, but:     from
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Aug 29, 2022 04:47
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So we had that C64 at home them a series of PCs but at the same time I was in elementary school and we had: PC Jrs in kindergarten, only for IBM's Writing to Read curriculum, which kind of just got kindergarteners circulating around the room using various IBM products their school had purchased. Apple IIs in the regular 1st-3rd grade computer lab and classrooms, mostly used for miscellaneous MECC titles. Teachers got their macs delivered the last year I was there and the fact that you could play an audio CD on the computer just blew me away. I was in a district with a separate school for 4th and 5th grade and they were an entirely Mac shop. The software I remember the most was Kid Pix and Hyperstudio (think Hypercard for children). Also was taught typing by mavis beacon at this time. Beyond that it was all wintel beige boxes except the high school art classroom had some early iMacs. When I got to my university in 2005 the last of the UNIX workstations there were being replaced with PCs running Linux and that's just been everything in my life ever since. I get nostalgic for the diversity sometimes but I don't miss trying to get files (like the JPG of a photo of me taken on my teacher's newfangled digital camera) transferred between them.
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Aug 29, 2022 05:05
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Aug 29, 2022 05:33
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I'm afraid Dave. I'm afraid Dave. I'm afraid I can't remember your ICQ number.
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Aug 29, 2022 06:21
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 Today's tech relic, a NEC PowerMate 466D, a 486-DX2 66MHz system from 1994-ish. I found this one at a client's site. The client is a pharmaceutical manufacturing and research company, they wanted me to power it up and retrieve any data off it that they might need to hang on to for regulatory reasons. When I got it, it was running MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1, for a single application, Millennium 2.1, which collects data from chromatography instruments. Once they had an export of the data, it was mine to do with as I pleased. So of course I installed a ESS Audiodrive, one of the better Sound Blaster Pro clones, and set about turning it into the kind of early 90s gaming system I'd have wanted when I was 10. I'm pretty sure the floppy drives and CD-ROM aren't original, but I like the two tone look. Also, the CMOS battery is just a standard lithium coin cell, so the first thing I did was pop in a fresh one.
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Aug 29, 2022 07:44
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it's weird how rare 486 and earlier systems have become, i think maybe because commodity PC hardware was seen as too ubiquitous, cheap and disposable and nobody bothered to stow it away in basements and attics like they did with the mac they paid $3000 for or the commodores and ataris they grew up with
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Aug 29, 2022 08:05
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r u ready to WALK posted:it's weird how rare 486 and earlier systems have become, i think maybe because commodity PC hardware was seen as too ubiquitous, cheap and disposable and nobody bothered to stow it away in basements and attics like they did with the mac they paid $3000 for or the commodores and ataris they grew up with Yeah. Even in 2010 486s were still very cheap and easily found in online marketplaces. Now they are pretty rare and pricey unless you are lucky and stumble upon one randomly like that poster above. 486DX2/66 is the best DOS gaming machine imo. It handles all the pre-win95 era games perfectly.
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Aug 29, 2022 08:13
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r u ready to WALK posted:it's weird how rare 486 and earlier systems have become It big.
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Aug 29, 2022 08:13
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The next thing that client wants me to do is destroy hundreds of perfectly good 5.25in and 3.5in floppy disks for security reasons 
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Aug 29, 2022 08:55
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Bargearse posted:The next thing that client wants me to do is destroy hundreds of perfectly good 5.25in and 3.5in floppy disks for security reasons Just rub a magnet against them, problem solved
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Aug 29, 2022 09:17
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You Am I posted:Just rub a magnet against them, problem solved Why, you think it'll scramble the client's neurons or something, so they'll change their mind?
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Aug 29, 2022 09:22
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Why, you think it'll scramble the client's neurons or something, so they'll change their mind? Get a big enough (and powerful enough) electromagnet and that just might work!
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Aug 29, 2022 09:29
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