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Ask Slashdot: What Were You Taught About Computers In High School?
An anonymous reader writes "What was taught to you about computers in High School? Computer use and computer science in schools are regular headlines, but what 'normal' do we compare it to? It's not a shared reference. A special class with Commodore PETs was set up just after I graduated, and I'm only starting to grey. Everybody younger has had progressive levels of exposure. What was 'normal' for our 40-, 30-, and 20-year olds here? And how well did it work for you, and your classmates?" For that matter, what's it like now — if you're in middle or high school now, or know students who are, what's the tech curriculum like?
Summer school, sure...
In the 80s, went to some summer camp after 2nd grade that had some science and tech classes... apart from getting into trouble by sticking a knife into an electrical outlet and playing lots of Spy Hunter (I was like, a god for a day because I made it to the boats level), that was probably my first into to Logo. But we didn't do anything amazing with it.
Somewhere around 6th grade at an International Catholic school in Thailand they gave us a touch typing class. That was genuinely useful, and accounts tracked our progress over the sessions, which was pretty remarkable given that they were green-screen DOS boxes or something crappy and barely networked. Later on in HS in the US, maybe 9th or 10th grade, they threw us in a short one-time "computer lab" with some typing tutor software, but that was crap.
Around 11th grade (1994), we had some CAD work on Macs in tech ed., but that was only because we were in a special Science & Tech magnet program... don't think that would have been the norm at most high schools.
Also, I used to spend my lunch breaks in the library, playing with the nice 3D graphing calculator on MacOS9. But I was, like, the only one, even in a magnet school.
That was pretty much it. Everything else I learned from my own tinkering at home with a Turbo Pascal book, playing with POVRay, and reading my TI-85 calculator user's manual straight through and programming a crappy Galaga clone. I never felt like I had what it takes to become a fully-fledged CS programmer like my friends who were self-taught into doing awesome demoscene assembly, so I ran off and majored in mechanical and aerospace engineering instead. Engineers seem to get bigger computers to play with anyway :P
To even be able to touch the TRS-80s in the computer lab, you had to have at least a C average in Algebra.
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In the mid 80's in Canada we used Icon's, which were QNX terminals. I learned and watched that if somebody watches over the shoulder of the teacher they could get the root password, and copy all of the system files into a local directory thus buggering up the entire network. It buggered things up so badly the teacher that was the admin could not fix it themselves. It was not me, but a guy I was working on the computers with. Me at the time I was using Pet's and writing in Waterloo Basic. I built my first ISAM system with Waterloo Basic.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
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in high school (I graduated in '89) as a freshman I was able to take the senior level programming class where we did fortran and cobol via remote sessions to a server at UF. Freshmen thru Juniors had programming in TRS-80 BASIC, which I had been doing for a while already so I was able to pass out of those classes.
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There are a couple exceptions, cad and electronics we got to use some old beaters, otherwise what we were thought about computers was that all these brand new powermac's were silly expensive and you are not to touch them, though they made a point to brag about how many they had in the library.
Honestly the best school/computer experience I had was in Elementary school in the early 80s. It was actually quite early in computer education history for a school to have a computer in every room and computer labs, but our little country school in northern Indiana had them (Apple IIs and Atari 400/800s) and we had a couple sessions each week were we would try different programs and just experience them. They even had us writing short programs as early as 2nd grade. All the computer classes I took after that in high school and at the college level were woefully out of date and had teachers/professors who either didn't know what they were talking about or who were teaching 20 year old technologies. So if you want to compare computer education now to something before, the bar isn't very high as far as I'm concerned.
But when was this? If you learned this in the 60s, then obviously that would have been the right time, but if you were learning this in the 80s, then it says quite a different thing about your high school.
I graduated in 1973. What did I learn about computers there? Nothing at all.
You damn kids get off my lawn...
-How to make it say hello in Basic once, or use a goto command to make it repeat forever.
-How to hit ctrl+c to make it stop
-How to use basic commands like catalog ("cat", eventually this because "dir"), list, run, save, and print.
-The difference between a KoalaPad and a mouse.
-And eventually how to play Zork and Oregon Trail.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
...were taught BASIC and 6502 Assembly.
Machines used: the year before I got into compsci at the highschool - a PDP11
First semester doing compsci: TRS80 model IV machines.
Second semester: we got a bunch of Apple IIe machines, which is how we got the assembly programming done.
Prerequisites were pre-algebra or algebra1 taken concurrently.
--
BMO
I'm currently a junior at high school, and really, the tech curriculum can't even be called that in my opinion. The best, and most in-depth, course at my school is Computer Science A AP (There used to be a B, but that was cancelled). I'm in it right now, and I basically sleep through all the classes. While it's true that for anyone who hasn't at any prior programming experience it's a bit more of a challenge, I only had a bare-bones introduction to C (not even a lot of pointer stuff, I had stop going to classes early), and even the object oriented stuff is not that hard. Granted, it's still early in the year. But in comparison, the rest of the tech curriculum is just Word Processing 101 and Microsoft Office. There's very little in the way of how computers work or how to program (Comp Sci AP is the only programming class). And it's a little depressing when you hear someone in your class say, "Wow, X person built a computer by himself," and you respond, "That's not too hard if he just bought the parts and put it together," and their next line is "But it's really hard. He must have programmed it himself and stuff." I think half the problem today is insufficient technology education in schools, which is why the "Tech Guy" stereotype even exists. And don't even get me started on the terrible security of my school district...
As a Junior (in 1976), I got to program in BASIC by timesharing into the Dartmouth computers, where BASIC was invented! There was also some lecture on what computers were and could do, but the majority of time was spent in a local college lab programming. Senior year I got to code FORTRAN on punched cards in my Calculus class. Our teacher had a deal with a different local college that allowed us time on their IBM mainframe (maybe a 360 . . .).
Actually really enjoyed both experiences, but that did not translate over in College. I became a computer professional after being in the "real world".
Honor est omni
Middle School(early 90s): All sorts of stuff with Apple IIes and Power PCs. School bought an Apple QuickTake when it came out, so we did digital graphics design and digital photography
High School(late 90s): Networking, C++, PC and Mac troubleshooting... took every opportunity to learn about computers, and was granted many of them
That electronic computers were huge "electronic brains" used by goverment and a few big companies.
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We had IBM model PS/2 model 25's and 30's. They are basically the same machine, but the model 30 was a beige box while the model 25 had an integral monitor. Both had the fantastic model M keyboard.
Above all else, I learned that you need to hire the ferry to cross the river. Fording the river is a fool's game.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
96-2000. The only computer-related course we had at my high school was a typing class, run by the driving instructor. I think the program we were using must have been an old version of word perfect, because it had the blue background and white text. It always felt horribly outdated there.
I graduated from a pretty typical suburban NJ high school in 1977. We had an HP 9810 (http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=51), and also a ARS-33 connected to a time-shared BASIC system a few towns away. I got to play with them my junior and senior years. That was my first introduction to any sort of computer. It was, or course, also my first introduction to computer games (hunt the wumpus, lunar landrer, and some kind of Star Trek thing where you got to explore the galaxy and blow up klingons with photon torpedos.
I was also lucky to spend the summer between my last two years of high school at a program run by Stevens Tech, where I was exposed to FORTRAN and PDP-10 assembler (both via punch cards).
I learned to write programs in pascal for my first class.... The next class.... I learned hyper card and director because the teacher was getting ready to retire.
When I went to highschool (I'm 25 years old) we had macs running Mac OS 8.6 (I think).
We learned how to touch type at around 25 words per minute, how to copy files around, and how to use word processors and spreadsheets (basic SUM() formula usage, etc).
Talking to my niece and other teenagers here in Australia, it sounds like these days they also learn email, browsing the internet/using google to do research, and they also learn basic HTML (really basic, don't even learn CSS), and basic graphic design as well.
I would like to see basic common sense security added to the list (minimum password complexities, logging out when you're done, malware awareness). I dunno, maybe they do teach that.
To me that seems about right. As long as you know enough to use google as part of your studying, and can write a resume and email it to a potential employer, then you've got it all covered. It's nice to see they also dip their toes into a few other areas like HTML and graphic design, just incase the kids take a liking to it and can decide if that is a good career path for them.
Did you ever see it print out that huge picture of Buzz Aldrin on the moon? The noise was very impressive.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
i was born in 1972, schooled in southern california.
grew up with IBM punchcards all over the house.
in 6th grade we had an apple ][ in the classroom,
but as i recall only as a treat: if you finished work early you could play Prince of Persia.
but even then a very small group of us would hang out in the library after school or at lunch
and teach ourselves basic. there was no concept of teaching us how to program in school.
by the time i reached 12th grade, there was a 'computer literacy' class offered,
i think they taught programming on TRS-80s, but even my friends who were in it
were way beyond what was covered in the class.
by then i was aspiring to be part of the amiga demo scene,
so i did an independent study to teach myself 680x0 assembly.
my teacher did a great job - he knew he had no way to really grade my progress,
so he helped me evaluate it myself. mad props for that.
i'm now a programmer, and pretty much all the core programmers i know
have a similar story - computers were around in high-school,
but really they taught themselves.
it's funny now - i look around facebook and see all these people i know
who had less than zero interest in computers when i knew them in their youth,
and are now product managers or otherwise have 'software' in their title.
i wonder if that sucks for them.
I don't think we were taught anything about computers in class, but there was a computer programming club. We used PORTRAN, which is a cut-down version of FORTRAN - I think it stands for Port-a-punch FORTRAN. The cards were sent away to a computer a few hundred km away, and a syntax error listing came back by the following week. It wasn't exactly a productive environment, so we competed to see who could get the most different errors in a single program.
In elementary school in Connecticut, we had commodore 64s and messed about with logo. The high school's computer lab had Franklin ACE clones. My family had an Apple IIe.
In middle school (in VirginiaI programmed basic on an Atari --might have been an 800, did word processing stuff on Apple IIe s. In High school, we did desktop publishing with a few mac pluses, and a SE. I didn't go to the school with the "supercomputer".
I used an Apple IIe in elementary about 1983-1984 (5th and 6th grades), had IBM compatibles on DOS in middle school (7th and 8th about 1985-1987) then IBM PCs in high school, Windows 2.0, upgraded to 3.0 senior year. I had the win 3.0 floppies (they had so many at school they threw them out) up until a couple years ago. Got 3.0 running on my home XT, but it was dog slow, but then everything was on the XT, except for games tied to the system clock, press "turbo" and 8MHz made all the games unplayable. CGA sucked, they had CGA on all but 2 at school, and EGA on the two "new" compters. Hercules for me at home. Faster, clearer, and any color you want, as long as it's amber.
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The 2nd and 3rd year of high school, we had about 3 hours a week of computer science. Basically we were given tasks that we could solve in either Pascal or C (which all the cool kids preferred). The mandatory assignments were quite basic, but we were allowed to do our own projects in the time we had left after doing the mandatory stuff. So a couple of us made a multiplayer 2d space shooter, quite a fun project.
All in all it was my favorite class. But I did go the science/electro program, '99 graduate in Sweden.
I was a student of a hungarian high school, we didn't learn anything about computers, we played Quake on LAN once a week.
With chemistry / physics teacher we formed a computer club, sold things & bought a TRS-80. I used it to do Z-80 assemby language programming. Things I learned then have served me to this day. Not until about 10 years later did the school buy machines and have a formal computer class.
My first year of university was the last year students were still using punched cards on a Burroughs mainframe, 1982-1983. The next year they had replaced it with a Honeywell system that had CRT terminals, and we science and engineering students could use an IBM PC XT. I did many numericla methods solutions with Turbo Pascal.
In 1979, I entered an experimental new class in a Houston high school that taught BASIC programming. No Commodore PETs for us (although I saved up my McPay and bought one of my own); we could only afford a big teletype terminal and a paper tape machine so we could save our programs on spools of punched tape.
In 1980, before I could complete that class, my family moved to a very small town in the innards of Deep East Texas where I was literally the only person in town with a computer of any kind. The student advisor finally decided that a statistics class was the closest thing she could get me into that was kind of like computer programming. I actually won the science fair with a cheap-assed video game I wrote that let you fire missiles at approaching targets. Hey, when all you've got to work with is 8K you don't write Space Invaders!
Computers were unheard-of in school in the mid-70's, at least in the small town where I grew up, but I did take Typing Class where I learned what I believe is the single most valuable skill that school taught me: how to type properly.
When I took Typing Class I was the only boy in a class of about 20-odd girls. I wanted to learn how to type because I thought it would be a useful skill but, frankly, the idea of typing on a computer never actually crossed my mind. I learned to type on a big Underwood manual typewriter. Toward the end of the class that I was in, the school got one electric typewriter, which was apparently a new technology at the time. It was a special reward to be allowed to use the electric typewriter in Typing Class.
In addition to how to type, a skill that I've used every day of my life, Typing Class also taught me a number of other useful things, like how to correctly fold a letter to fit it into an envelope (which a surprising number of people don't know how to do), and how to do basic filing and the like, all of which have come in handy since I have my own small business and need to be able to do things like that.
As for computers, I learned that on my own. I knew some guys that had Apple computers, and I purchased a Commodore 64 of my own in 1982 since it was much cheaper than an Apple II. My thought at that time was that I would buy a C64 and see if I liked having a computer and if so, I would buy a "good one", i.e. an Apple II, afterward. Once I discovered the capabilities of the Commodore 64, I never did buy that Apple. My next purchase after that was a Commodore 128, followed by an Amiga, followed by a series of MS-DOS machines, and today I have several desktops and laptops, all of which run on Linux.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
.....Selectric typewriters. (Class of 1978 represent!)
I'd tell you to get off my lawn, but it went underwater when Pangea split up.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I'm graduating this year and so far I've taken ap comp sci (more or less Java with a touch on algorithms) and a computer and network technology course taught by a guy with a unix beard. I'm very lucky to go to the school I do, it's a public non-charter school but it's in a fairly affluent area and we're one of the top schools in my state.
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Showing my age here, but when I was in high school, I did the teaching. Mostly to fellow students, but I did have two of the math & physics teachers in my "class" off and on. I taught Pascal on an Apple II. A little later, the high school down the road from mine actually set up proper programming classes (teaching Basic on Commodore computers). A bunch of work colleagues who are about my own age had similar experiences -- few high schools were set up to teach anything about computers at the time, so the nerds amongst us got to see the "other side" of teaching.
Well, I'm currently 24 so it's been a couple years, but for my junior and senior year I was able to attend a magnet school part time called CART.
During my junior year I took the Cisco networking course, then for my senior year I took the computer science class that went over programming in Java. We didn't do anything too in depth, but it was enough to get me interested in computer science, and now I'm almost done with my bachelor's degree. At the regular school I would have been restricted to our Office course.
I don't think computers were ever mentioned when i was at secondary school (in Britain) in the early 70s.
My first contact with computers was at tech college in about 77, where i learnt a little bit of (i think) BASIC programming - using paper tape and a teletype, dialling in to the local university's mainframe.
We had a classroom full of Commodore PET 4032s, and another class with Commodore 64s. We learned programming using Waterloo Structured BASIC on the PETs and COMAL on the C64s. My last year there the school got a few ICON computers which ran QNX and came with a bunch of programming languages, and that's when I taught myself C. I've loved C ever since.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Basically, I was lucky. Introduction to programming and AP computing science on IBM PCjrs with Turbo Pascal. It was great start.
I started Elementary school in the late eighties. I went to a university laboratory school, so we had a bit better technology than some of the surrounding schools. We had a computer lab with multiple Apple II e systems, and an Apple II GS. Each classroom had Apple II e systems as well, but not enough for the whole class. During my fifth grade year, the school purchased several Pentium I computers which were slowly deployed, starting with the lowest grades, and working their way up, much to the annoyance of the fifth and sixth graders. Only one of these computers made it into my classroom, and it was for the teacher's station. The teacher's station had the computer, a laserdisk player, and a large CRT television that could display from either the computer or the laserdisk.
I remember some of the lessons about the technology itself, but mostly we used the technology for educational games, number munchers, Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, Carmen Sandiago, etc. I remember learning about floppy disks while they were still floppy, and thinking that the 3.5 floppies were what people were talking about when they said "hard disk" until my brothers (older) corrected me. I remember being told to always touch something metal before touching a computer, to ground myself.
Middle school it was completely back to Apple II E computers. I took a "programming" class, and was quite disapointed that all I learned was Apple II e BASIC, and nothing more complicated than simple arathmatic and printing out a block graphic we first drew on graph paper, then wrote the code on paper, then typed the code in. It was boring as hell.
My high school had pentium class computers in each classroom, although often just one. There were still some 386 computers in the hall outside the language arts (English) wing that were used for word processing only. I was in yearbook, and I was the most tech savvy person there, and I networked the OS 8 macs together (localtalk) and later oversaw the conversion of files when the yearbook upgraded from OS 8 with Adulus Pagemaker to Pentium class computers with Adobe Pagemaker.
LIke many here I imagine, I learned most of what I learned about computers at home, not at school, but there was technology instruction at my schools, even if it was fairly rudimentary.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
We were supposed to learn how to make folders and type in word.
I learned that it was a lot of fun to delete/rename my classmates documents once they saved them. It was so fun when they panicked when all their 'work' vanished as soon as they were done with it. (0 security on the network)
I was in High School in the 80s, and I don't remember learning much other than typing. However, one thing I do remember learning is to be comfortable with computers so that later, in college, I soaked up every computer class I could before dropping out because I was offered a job that paid better than what I could expect upon graduation.
I'm still in that job, and am still comfortable with computers.
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I graduated from HS in 1971. In those ancient times, most people knew computers as big machines with lots of blinking lights that were subject to paranoia and megalomania. So no high-school classes in computing!
Ick, C++ is not a good language to learn with... in all the classes I've taken using C++, we spent more time debugging memory allocation and stack overflows than actually doing what we were supposed to.
Java was/is still pretty crappy, but at least it pretty much behaves as documented, and standard documentation is more readily available.
By all means, learn some C and assembly to help bridge to the low level stuff. But C++ is such a mess. My University would teach the CS curriculum in other languages and then offered a 2-credit C++ elective to dump all the "practical" shit on you if you wanted it... I think that's probably the best way.
My school had a basic keyboarding class where they tried to get students to learn how to type, despite being a rather skilled typist. I just couldn't make myself sit down and type rows of nonsense or do daily exercises, I only ever did just enough to pass and that was it. In that class they also taught you the very basics, like this is a monitor, this is the tower etc. This was a requirement for graduation and everyone had to take it and pass.
My school also had several elective classes, with computers an A+ class, where at the end you were expected to take the A+ exam and pass it. A CCNA class that was two years, or four semester in total of study. Though you weren't expected to take the exam at the end. We also had the 'network repair' class where students basically worked on the schools network and computers. The A+ class was a requirement for this class.
I learned a lot about computers while I was in highschool, I took the A+ class and it was mostly a breeze for me as I knew just about everything prior to the class, but I did learn a bit of book learning that you typically don't run into just working on computers. I also tried to take the CCNA classes but I couldn't get enough interest to actually form the classes, so I took the Network Repair class instead and during the class I did CCNA work and during my A+ classes I did repair work. All in all my schools education on computers was fantastic for anyone who was interested.
That said the class sizes were relatively small and made up typically of most people you expected how ever we had a few outliers here and there. Talking to other people here in Texas though my school was the exception rather than the rule when it came to computer education though.
I'm 22, from Australia.
In school we used computers for everyday stuff: documents, presentations research, etc. But from what I can remember we were never taught anything about them at all.
In Scotland in the mid/late 70's you could do computing as part of a maths course, so we all signed up as "Computers Were The Future".... Got taught Fortran by the simple expedient of handwriting code on gridded paper. These were then gathered up and posted once a week to the county computing centre where they were transferred to punch cards, the job ran, and the program listing and output printed and mailed back to us. Whole process took 2-3 weeks and if you missed a quote mark or comma and the job bombed, you had to rewrite the offending page, resubmit the following week and so on. One time I was about 8 weeks trying to get the one 20 line program to run.
Grade 1-5, had a computer lab with games. They all had some version of DOS, one was some old Mac. We went once a week, but really only played games.
Grade 6-8 had labs, but were only used for typing/research. Nothing taught beyond how to use a search engine and Word.
High school had typing, programming (c++/java), web design, computer graphics (photoshop), and Oracle. I hear these offerings are rare, even for the area. The programming was taught by a math teacher who was semi-competent. Typing did what it was supposed to, I couldn't touch type, then I could. Web design, Oracle, and Computer Graphics were a joke of the highest level. Retrospectively, I think the Oracle class was more training for a salesman than anything worth my time. Web design tried to teach Dreamweaver and Flash...instead of anything worthwhile. Computer graphics didn't really teach anything, they said here's photoshop, now make something.
My high schools days predated computers, but I still acquired what is perhaps the most valuable skill needed by a progammer - touch typing. Except I learned on a manual typewriter, which penalizes mistakes harshly. People with CRT displays have it easy.
My high school was fortunate enough to have a great math teacher that taught college level calculus. Her classroom still had a giant slide rule mounted above the blackboard (this gives you an idea of how long ago it was), but she also realized, even back then, how important computers would come to be. In the back of the classroom there sat an ASR-33 Teletype, complete with paper tape punch and reader. It connection to some mainframe at, I believe, Penn State through a 110 baud connection. I spent untold hours after school in that classroom learning Basic. The programs had to be typed in my hand; if you wanted to save it for later you dumped it out to the paper tape punch.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Around 7th or 8th grade, we had a computer keyboarding and computer literacy class. I think I took both in 7th grade together, whereas they usually wanted students to complete keyboarding *before* computer literacy... I could two finger at that point faster than most of the others who'd completed keyboarding. It was what I would expect comp lit to be now -- the first semester focused on the history of computing, as well as the internals, all the way down to the bits and registers. The second semester was a somewhat limited computer math with BASIC programming. In high school, you could take a computer math course to learn logic and procedures in Pascal, followed by computer science which focused on real world problems. It was a very comprehensive course structure for its time, I thought. This was all in the early 90's. I have no idea what's taught now, but since I still run into waaay too many people who haven't a clue, I guess they dropped a lot of it.
In the equivalent of 9th and 10th grades, DOS, Lotus 1-2-3 and Pascal programming. In 11th grade, Pascal again and Scheme, Z80 machine language (not assembly!). In 12th grade, C++ (Object Oriented) and x86 Assembly. in 13th grade, we were set free to explore and learn extra stuff (Java in my case).
In 92-93 high school year, I took the BASIC programming class with my best friend.. we'd been dabbling with BASIC for about 7-8 years at that point (starting with his CoCo3, etc). After the second week, the teacher decided we knew more than what the curriculum was going to cover, so we moved on to playing NetHack for the remainder of the semester.
Those were valuable skills, that I still occasionally use to this day. Tho I've never actually beat the game. :-(
Mine was good for a high school AP comp sci class in the 80s. We had a lab of IBM PC/2s, linked by Ethernet, but no Internet.
Subject matter was taught in Pascal: searching and sorting algorithms (everything from bubble to various trees to radix), data structures (arrays but then progressing to linked lists, trees, balanced trees... probably hit peak at sparse matrices.) All in all, a really good program, mainly because we had a good teacher who knew his stuff. It set me up pretty well for a CS degree in college.
Fortran 77 and UCSD Pascal on DEC PDP-11/70.
Honeywell teletypes.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
In 1974, GE loaned a Telex terminal to our small-town high school. In advanced math class I got to write Basic programs on paper tape. Made a long distance phone call to run the program on a mainframe, usually once a day. Made me quite careful about syntax errors. I was hooked -- in a few years I had a couple of CS degrees.
Now the high school kids use tiny tablets with more storage, memory, and speed than the mainframes of the '70s. They control undersea submersible vehicles via satellite, real time, from the classroom. It's great! Can't way to see what happens in the next 20 or 40 years.
Me? Nothing. I generally taught others how to use their computers, or fixed the computers. My HS only had like 4 Macs, no computer teachers. They weren't even connected via Appletalk/Localtalk
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I graduate not more than a few years ago.
What did I learn about computers in my entire journey from elementary to high school? Typing.
Yeah that's the only thing was typing on a QWERTY keyboard. There was also a technology class that was just messing around with Word/Excel/Powerpoint. Everything else I learned by experience and by just using it all the time, but I'm a technologically oriented person who can tell you what ATA means or the difference between a byte and a bit, or even where the word bit came from.
Most other people from my generation can't.
Technology education in America is absolutely terrible.
When I was a senior in high school (1989-1990), we were still using TRS80 Model 3s, not much different than the Model 1s that I used in a summer programming camp 8 years earlier. Myself and two of the other computer inclined students were asked by the teacher for the BASIC programming class if we wanted to represent the school in a BASIC programming competition. Of course, we accepted. Another teacher drove us to the competition. There was a time set aside for the teacher to review the problems with us, discuss algorithms, etc. Our review consisted of "Good luck, I'll be back to pick up the computer you're going to win" And we did come in second place and win a Mac of the period. The first place finishers were Mac people, which probably gave them an edge over the 2 Commodore 64 and Apple IIC/TI 99 4A users since the programming was done on a Mac. Lots of memories
I was in highschool in the late 60's, early 70's. Computers were something that IBM had. One thought of HAL, as in "2001". My oldest brother worked for DARPA - my first exposure to computers was logging on to some mainframe somewhere using his TI Silent 700 terminal (printed everything out on thermal paper), using Tenex (I'll never forget the manual, titled 'The Joy of Tenex'). Yes, a 300 bps acoustic coupler got the job done. But I could play Adventure on some computer in Stanford or San Diego, or wherever the heck it was. I also learned to program in C. Those were the days?
We had TI-99/4a machines and one IBM compatible in jr high (7th-9th) with a class in BASIC on the TI machines. Once we moved over to the HS building we had access to Apple II machines and compatibles (Franklin ACE) and a couple IBM compatibles. Computer classes were limited to BASIC followed by Pascal, both taught on Apple. There was a short lived computer club that explored special topics such as vector graphic programming and Assembly - also Apple II based. Classes were taught by the math department instructors, or two of them at least. Chances are many of them had never used a computer at that time. In hindsight this set us up quite well for the immediate future and even today I use techniques and concepts I learned in those classes. It was less about the languages we were using and more about the planning and problem solving needed to accomplish a task. I apply similar techniques to problems that I use Powershell or Perl to deal with today. Truthfully most of our time in the "computer lab" was spent hacking around with computers, dot matrix printers, a couple of paddles connected to one of the Apple machines, and bootlegging games. Adventure games and the Atari catalog were the most popular. Somewhere at the bottom of a box in someone's attic is a copy of Jungle Hunt that displays my name in the copyright field. Hex editors were fun.
In Jr. High (81-83), I learned some BASIC programming on Apple II+'s. I had a good time with it. Happened to be a private school.
High School (-86), I seem to remember having had a computer class, but I don't remember a damn thing about it. Did we do PASCAL? I don't remember for sure. I'm pretty sure we had PC's. We had an Apple IIe at home, and I hacked BASIC on that.
So I learned a little bit about variables, flow control... And I guess that's about it. Unless there was PASCAL - in which case I guess I also learned a bit about calling functions. I feel like we must have - because I'm pretty sure I knew about functions when I went to college.
I'd love to see a follow-up on this subject: "What did you learn about programming in college..."
I went to a high school in NY that was set up as a magnet school for career education; I went for computer programming. We did most of our creative work using FORTRAN 44 on acoustic modem teletypes with paper-punch ribbons for storage. Behind the scenes there was a mainframe somewhere. We also learned about IBM punch cards and some other language (COBOL?) but we didn't do much with that (except for figuring out how to override the punch card machine so that we could punch out EVERY hole in the entire card).
WE were taught they are expensive tools. and because you went outside the class outline you get sent to detention. Also you are told you "DESTROYED" an altair 8800 by making the LED's do a cylon scan. The rincipal and Superintendant does not care that pressing reset will make it return to normal, you DESTROYED IT.
I.E. Teachers are morons, School administrators are bigger morons, and I still hold these beliefs close and dear today.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You took one of the business classes. Then you got to learn how to be an applications jockey for Wordperfect and PFS: First Publisher. There were some simple computer literacy classes during middle school, but it was a semester of "spend 4 45 minute classes during a week listening to lectures and 1 45 minute class actually punching keys". There was a second semester elective class of "computer programming" in Apple BASIC and there were 4 people in that class.
The heaviest use of computing in the high school was the yearbook and newspaper staff trying to get their feet wet with desktop publishing using Pagemaker and the only reason those got done properly is because I plowed through Pagemaker to learn it and ended up teaching the rest of the staff (and I got made Editor senior year...woo me!).
For time reference, I graduated in 1993.
We learned everything from basic PC hardware (back when computers had numbered slots, instead of named ones) to intro programming. But my high schools were much further behind. I learned to type on an electric typewriter, and at my second high school, a fine arts school, all we had was a mac lab with a dot matrix printer, where we learned to use a word processor. It wasn't until I went to college that I really learned how to use a computer (and build or repair one) and 90% of that was self taught.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Trash 80s (smile when you say that, pardner!) in a class network with a "server" that was a giant monitor unibody TRS with 4, count 'em, 4 floppy drives.
We would boot and put our data disk in the server to load and save Basic programs.
BTW, for historians, the classes were called "Data Processing I" and II.
I wrote a command line faker program which accepted "load" commands, paused the proper amount of time, then spit out some rude error message.
To quote Lois Griffen's mom and dad, "At the time, it was the right thing to do."
Later I wrote a program to draw a 3D cube. It just plotted hand-placed points, no 3D calculations involved, just an array of 2D points that looked like a cube, using pixels the size of a human head.
The teacher, coincidentally head of the math department, saw it and was stunned as there was no 3D math built into the Basic.
I had become like Richard Pryor in Superman III, just released earlier that year, doing the impossible with computers and dual coordinates. I chose not to disabuse him of this notion.
UMich AA and Pascal will have to wait for another day.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I took a couple of classes in high school (mid-to-late-80s)... and they were pretty much on TRS-80 Model 3's and 4's. I already learned a little about BASIC since I had been using it on the Atari/C64 for about 4-5 years at that point. (I would've liked some assembly/low level stuff, but it was self-motivated when they got to a BASIC "concept" I already knew about.) What the low level snooping taught me (between bouts of playing Telengard) helped immensely when I started giving myself infinite lives in games and fiddling with the 68000 (on my shiny, new-to-me used Amiga and Action Replay add-on.)
:) I finished my intro C language class in college on my Amiga with Lattice C. The campus bookstore had a good deal on it. :)
:) Computers were still a novelty or a niche product when I was growing up. Most people hated them, and most people thought they were toys. I'm 42 now, and my only regret is not focusing my efforts earlier to make my own utilities and games. I used my skills to forward my pathetic gaming capability... :)
I was already interested in computers by the time I took any classes on it, so I pretty much was self-taught until college, when I took courses to supplement my love of computers... It's been downhill ever since.
Most of the "PC" computers were limited to the secretarial classes that my high school taught... so we didn't fiddle with DOS officially. There was an Apple 2 in the Home Economics department that we used to play Gemstone Warrior before school. (I think it was actually used to show cross-stitch patterns). Nothing like playing Gemstone Warrior on a monochrome screen.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
They had a mini computer at the high school that could be seen in the administrative office when they left the door open. Nobody was *taught* anything, but there were a few people that had some kind of hobby system at home.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
My high school obtained a PDP-11 (with dual 8" floppy drives) while I was a sophomore. I was given free reign to use it as much as I wanted, with no supervision. I ended up writing assembly language and parlayed the experience into a nice job at the local university programming and building interfaces for a couple PDP-11s, then building custom S-100 graphics systems, etc.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
As science project, a group of pupils from our school designed and build a digital rotary speedometer to measure the number of rotations in a machine designed to first clean and then coat silicon wafers for the chip production. This was in the late 1980ies and a pretty impressive hand-on to the real computer science.
In the overall curriculum, there was not much about computers, except it was somehow expected from pupils who had a private computer at home or access to a computer at a parent's workplace to write homework on said computer and hand in the printouts.
I learned that at the most inopportune moments computers wouldn't open pod bay doors or cancel self-destruct sequences.
I took summer school logo class in the late 80's to learn logo and make a lego traffic light built with legos loop in the proper colour sequence. In middle school we learned Toolbook -- just the language as I recall, not really how to structure software. I took high school CS classes in the late 90s. Our standard was the AP Computer Science [pdf] curriculum. We learned basic data structures in Pascal and C++ (structs/records, classes, arrays), sorting algorithms, hashing functions. The most valuable part of the class was problem solving. We would get various problems, like write a program that takes an input of the length of a side of a hexagon and draw a hexagon a line at a time with X's. Or output all the permutations of a given input. Or determine the pattern of a given sequence then write a program that outputs the nth number/word in that sequence. Gaining experience solving lots of different computing problems, recognizing patterns and having to do it quickly and 100% accurately was the most valuable part of the class in my opinion. We learned nothing of database design and extremely light, if anything on software engineering.
Then again, I graduated in '76.
Oh yeah, we also learned hex in a new math class. But they never mentioned why we should care.
Cobol and Fortran. This after programming assembly since I had been 12. Also in my highschool in 1988 Computer programming was considered a "Shop" class categorized with car repair and typing.
For me, computer classes in high school started out with the history of computing, starting back in the 19th century with the use of punched cards to control looms and working forward through the era of IBM mainframes and into the first PCs. Then introductory programming in BASIC, COBOL and FORTRAN, and classes that concentrated more on the theory of data structures and algorithms using Pascal (which was much more suited to the job than the other 3 major languages). Included were side-trips into the principles underlying the hardware and the differences between different CPUs. Half our work was done on early PCs, half on terminals attached via network to the district's central computers.
Things like word processors and spreadsheets were not covered in the computer classes. Those were over in the business curriculum, covered in classes on using and operating standard business machines. A lot of students would take those classes without ever taking a computer class.
I graduated in 1982, that was the year they replaced the time share terminals with Commodore Pets. The year prior we spent learning FORTRAN, we were now able to move into the brave new world of BASIC. One fun thing about the time share terminals, they used acoustic couplers and dial up, if you stood in the corner of the room and whistled the correct note, you could disconnect all the terminals in the room simultaneously. Of course, you then had to run for your life...
I've wrestled with reality for 35 years and I'm happy to say, I finally won out - Elwood P. Dowd
There was no mention of computers in any class.
Just one data point.
High school for me was fall 1997 to spring 2001, and the computer courses I recall taking were the typical "keyboarding" class, PASCAL and Visual Basic. We also did some stuff with AutoCAD in shop class, but I don't really consider that a computer course. Just about everything computer-related when I was in high school was incredibly mundane and elementary. Now, 10+ years later, I hear the same school has more advanced networking and IT-type classes similar to what I had to go to college to learn.
To be honest, I've found that I've learned a lot more about computers the past several years through simple hands-on experience than what I learned both in high school and college combined. Of course, the fact that tech is evolving so quickly as to render lots of knowledge rapidly outdated could have something to do with this.
One of the math teachers decided he wanted to teach a computer science class. He arranged a DecWriter with a connection to the Vax at the University. The next year the school bought Apple IIs with CPM cards. I learned several programming languages, logic, algorithms, compilers....you name it. Because of that one high school teacher I have a very successful tech career. Between what I learned in that class and what I learned on my own, college was a complete snooze.
I went through primary school in the early-to-mid nineties, and here's what I learned back then:
- Touch typing
- Programming (with Logowriter)
- Word processing (with Microsoft Creative Writer)
- Spreadsheets (can't even remember what the program was called)
I remember that the teachers back then specifically pointed out that they weren't going to teach us Word or Excel, because the concepts were the same regardless of whatever actual word processor or spreadsheet package we ended up using in the future. I really disagreed with them at the time, but now I can see that they were right. Office 2010 looks nothing like Office 95 but the concepts are exactly the same. Office 2025 will probably look completely different again.
However in high school, everyone came from somewhere different, and had a different level of computing under their belt. Unfortunately for me, this meant that I had to re-learn everything from primary school again. Word processors, spreadsheets, Logo.
My hope in the future is that the computing cirriculum for students can become more standardised so that high schools can build upon what was learned earlier. What really holds back computing education is that every level of schooling has to assume that students are starting with nothing. Primary schools, middle schools, high schools, and even some trade schools and colleges have to assume that their incoming students don't know how to use a computer.
If kids could start learning early, and never have to backtrack, it would be easy to fit the following into the K12 curriculum:
- Touch typing
- Basic OS concepts like directories and files, networks, applications
- How to use an office suite, including a word processor, spreadsheet and database program (including doing simple SQL queries)
- Basic programming constructs like if/while loops, functions
- Basic computer science, including searching, sorting, trees, hash tables, etc.
Maybe not everyone would understand the last one, but so what? Not everyone who graduates high school fully understands calculus either.
I'm 48, so my story starts around 1977.
When I was around 13, my brother was going to UC Santa Cruz, and he showed me how to play games on the PDP-11/45 running RSTS/E. I was fascinated, but it wasn't until the next year, when someone in my Jr High mentioned games on the University's computer that I went up there and tried them again (the university had a free "games" account anybody could use)
I ended up getting frustrated, because I couldn't stop playing the game "Animal" (I didn't know about Control-C).
After learning a bit more, I was determined to teach myself all I could about computers. I got a book on BASIC, then one on Boolean Logic, and I was off to town.
It wasn't until I got to High School that I found a computer class I could take in my own school - it was FORTRAN using the school's IBM 360/30 mainframe (had to learn a little JCL for that too). By that time I had already taught myself Pascal and C and some other languages, but I wanted some extra credit. Towards my Junior or Senior year, they started giving classes on Apple IIs they had bought, but I thought of them as little toys compared to the DEC and IBM machines I was using, so didn't bother.
All the people I knew who were computer geeks when I started were mostly 18-21-year-olds who were studying Information Science at UCSC (they didn't have Computer Science there until later). A few kids who came to my highschool when I was 17 or 18 had home microcomputers, but that was still pretty rare among people I knew.
Since I was born in 1960 my high school computer lab was very interesting. We had cards with little ovals on them and a soft pencil. We wrote our Fortran or Basic program on paper in a notepad until we thought we had it right then copied each line to a card by shading in the appropriate oval with pencil. The cars were sent off to a nearby college which had a mainframe. The hand filled out cards were passed through a reader that generated punched cards. We got the cards back the next day and corrected errors by hand using a light blocking sticky tape to cover holes in the right place and a hand operated punch to make new holes. The punched cards were shipped off and read in to generate a printout of the program that was shipped back with the cards. We compared the printout with what we originally wrote and if it checked out the cards were shipped back and the program executed. We got back the cards and the result of the execution in the form of more line printer output. If there were no syntax errors and all went well it was the best part of a week between starting to write the code and getting the execution results back.
Nothing like a little instant gratification...
As a Freshman in 1995, I was taught that I was a faggot and a nerd for being into computers, BBS's, technology in general.... (The sentiment of my peers, permitted by my teachers. One teacher even enjoyed chiming in, but I was too strong to care or even report anyone.)
As a Senior in 1999, I was taught that everyone wished they could know as much as me about computers, and that the ability to type and print a book report was way easier and looked better, garnering higher grades with lower effort. The same people that dissed me in 1995, later, begged me for help.
---------------------
But at the time, you had to take a course in computers to specifically learn anything about them in the school setting. Obviously all my learning was from around 1989 and onward, and at home.
The way the tech is proliferated and involved in daily life, I doubt much needs to be instructed about computers in general --- maybe there should be classes on specific foci, like programming, engineering, etc?
I graduated in 1995 from an otherwise top-notch high school in California, and would have loved to take a real course on any technical aspect of computers, but all the school really offered was a series of courses for learning to use a MS-DOS or Apple II-series computer in a business environment.
Our junior high (grades 7 & 8) was somewhat better about it, as one of the grade-specific electives rotated through a different class each quarter, with both grades having a "computers" course. Since only a few of us had a computer at home, most of the two-year class was devoted to basics like typing, how to use the computer, desktop publishing & word processing -- but there was also a segment on the internal parts & how they worked, messing around with LOGO, and a week or two each year was devoted to different aspects of computer history.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
I was in high school from 1979-1983. My junior or senior year I took a couple of elective computer classes offered for advanced high school students through the junior college downtown. We mostly learned BASIC, which we ran on the motley assortment of equipment the instructor could get his hands on: a TRS-80 Model 1, an Apple ][ plus, and a couple of dumb terminals that logged into the college's DEC PDP via acoustic-coupled modems. Since we didn't have enough terminals/computers for each student, we wrote out our programs on notebook paper and took turns typing them in, then printing them for the teacher to look over and grade. We did a project with punch cards (I think it might have been a Fortran program), mostly because the equipment was available, and some shops still used them. It wasn't until I saved up my money to buy an Atari 400, and then went to college to study Computer Science that I had regular access to a computer. So I was a member of the last generation to first learn to use computers as an "adult" (or near enough).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I graduated from an unusually good and small public HS in New Jersey in 2009. I took APCS A and AB (the last year AB existed) in my sophomore and junior years, so we did fundamentals of programming (in Java), algorithms, polymorphism, inheritance. In APCS AB, we did data structures (trees, heaps, linked lists, hash and tree sets/maps), big-O notation and basic complexity analysis. After I exhausted the AP stuff, my school let me do an advanced independent-study type thing for credit, where I pretty much made up my own curriculum, as long as I could justify it. There, I learned Python, CGI/webapps (which culminated in a simple AJAX IMAP mail client), x86 assembly, Qt, and some other stuff. Myself and another friend of mine (in the same class) went to NJIT's programming competition and won it outright (we'd never been before or since) out of about 50 schools.
Looking back on it, it's just about the most fun programming I've ever had. Now that I'm in university, I do some really interesting and fun stuff, but it's all for classwork, so there's deadlines and I can't just go off in an interesting direction when I feel like it. And I have a heavy enough courseload that I don't have enough free time to program much. I still have fun with it, but I'd rather spend my time going out to eat with friends, or seeing a movie or something. Having a guaranteed 45 minutes a day where all I could do was go code interesting things was (looking back on it) a huge factor in getting me where I am today. I had an unusual situation and a fantastic teacher, and I wonder what happens to kids like me who don't.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
The tech curriculum at my high school (Northcote College, in Auckland, New Zealand) is rather advanced compared to some others I've seen. First years get a half-year compulsory course, which covers some aspects of Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash, as well as the good old Microsoft Office skillset. From second year onwards, it's all optional.
Second-year course (which is a full-year course) covers the same stuff as first-year, but more web stuff using Dreamweaver, basic CSS, more Photoshop, less Flash. It also dabbles in VB.NET programming.
Third-year (NCEA Level One) is a full-year course which does more web stuff, and much much much more VB.NET (it's all relatively simple stuff though. writing a small list sorting algorithm is amongst what has to be done).
Fourth and fifth year (NCEA L2 and L3 respectively) I don't know anything about, because I'm only a third-year and haven't done any of those courses yet ;)
It's all kind of basic, though. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, VB.NET. I refused to use Dreamweaver in my courses and started using Sublime Text instead :D
In middle school we had mandatory typing instruction - on C64's. I was bored out of my mind during the tedious typing drills that I finished in well under half the allotted time, so I eventually found that I could escape out of the program to the C64 prompt (and get back in if I wanted to) and do BASIC programming. I learned a little BASIC that way - really, just enough to annoy the teacher who would reboot my C64 when the class would break for lunch. That didn't matter since the remaining half hour after lunch was plenty of time to do both halves of the lesson.
Later in middle school we learned apple works on an Apple IIGS and claris works on a Mac LC-something-or-other. Not very exciting stuff; it really taught us more about how horrifically unreliable 3.5" floppy disks are, I had to redo more than a few assignments because my disks turned to useless mishmash before the semester was over.
High school was all self-taught for me from a CSci perspective. The notion of a dedicated graphics card was just catching on, and modems were getting faster than I could type (a nice change). I learned how to write really crazy batch files in DOS, and did four years of high school math and science in three so I could move on to university earlier. My high school was just starting to think about this "internet" thing, and our library may have had (what was then) a fairly high speed connection that was available on just a couple of dedicated systems.
At the university you could access the internet from your laptop if you had an ethernet card set for DHCP.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I had no fewer than four (mandatory) typing courses. Each year, the teachers exclaimed their praise at my abilities while I struggled to understand how no one else could remember last year's lessons. As far as I can remember, there were no programming courses available outside of invitation-only scenarios where classes were less than 5 specially selected students who more or less maintained the school's network. In middle school we did a brief section on html before we switched to documenting population and $$ milestones in SimCity 2000. Stay classy, Idaho.
Well, for me, normal in high school was doing java using Eclipse. I actually, don't think Eclipse was that bad (it gives you what you need, even if it's somewhat cluttered and unnecessary) and even liked it before I got into the terminal stuff. What was bad was how dependent were were on it. I didn't have to use the command line until college. On the first day of college CS, typing "javac" into the command prompt was mentioned and it actually came as a shock. On top of it, in high school and college, we started on Windows whereas now I'm of the opinion that Windows is the one OS you really SHOULDN'T be programming on. But that's beside the point. What high school did teach me was a basic introduction to java and that's all I can ask for. The more important thing it taught me was a respect for computers by a wonderful teacher who cared about her students and imparting knowledge on us. In the long run, I think that's a LOT more important any actual method.
That was on Apple //cs and (a few) //es, using IIRC Bank Street Writer and some dedicated wpm-counting program. I ended up with 40-50 WPM, I think. This was in late 1992 to early '93.
In high school it was 68030-powered Mac Performas running System 7. I think we were taught "office" type tasks and a bit about doing research on the Internet, using Netscape 2.x (or maybe 1.x) over the school's T1 line, which was dog slow on account of being shared. Later on I took an elective for Lotus 1-2-3 and Internet (the latter wasn't on the syllabus but was taught anyway by a forward-thinking teacher) in a lab of 486 PCs running Win 3.1 and NetWare and Netscape 3.x. I got my very first HoTMailL account for that class, in late '96, when it was still independent.
A bit earlier than that I took a course that included a little Applesoft BASIC in summer school, IIRC around 7th grade.
Mostly I'm self-taught aside from the formal instruction in programming (mainly C++, a little Ada, Scheme, COBOL, Java, x86 assembly[1]) that I took at university.
[1] Bleah. My intro to assembly was with a 16-bit 8086 assembler written for DOS in the late '80s, taken in the early '00s. My alma mater's since switched to MIPS assembly, which at least can't be as poorly designed for learning.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Typing, word processors, spreadsheets, flat-style databases, presentations. The last one I absolutely hated every minute of and didn't gain one fucking thing from. The first three were more useful, but I previously learned them in middle school. The typical office suites/programs they "taught" were Microsoft Works, ClarisWorks, AppleWorks, and just a little bit of Microsoft Office.
Oh, and I learned the basics of AutoCAD in a crappy class with Windows 98 when Windows XP was for a few years the standard. Yay.
I don't remember much else... because there really wasn't much. Honestly, probably the most important stuff I learned was in middle school in the form of how to use web browsers and search engines (ie. web-based research). School sucked, they never taught shit I was actually interested in.
I graduated in 1975 when dinosaurs and the Bee Gees roamed the earth. School was boring, so I read science fiction in study hall - about one paperback every day or so. I read the hilariously dated "When Harlie was One" by David Gerrold in 1973, which is where I first learned what a computer virus was. I used to try and discuss them with fellow students and professors all the way until the 80s, but nobody knew what the fuck I was talking about. The few that could grasp the concept didn't believe it ("Why would anyone do THAT?"). Worse, the girls were thoroughly unimpressed. While the latter is still true, I sound a lot smarter these days.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
My teacher knew as much about being cool as I did though: So in computer class, he let me write my own code while the rest of the class did the standard projects. The best thing I did in computer class was write a random sentence maker. Everyone loved that. Also, you'd be surprised how much abuse 5 1/2" floppies can take before they don't work. We punched holes in them, scratched them. What finally had them completely stop though was when we stapled them. :P I predicted that one was gonna kill it.
God spoke to me
I went to highschool in New York in the mid-80s. We had about 30 Apple IIes in the lab. The school had an introductory course and an advanced course. We programmed in Applesoft BASIC entirely for both classes and assistance from PLE, a memory-resident program editing aid.
Programs we wrote in the advanced class:
+0 Meh
DEC TOPS-10, ASR-33 Teletype, Acoustic coupler for the modem [and a rotary dial phone to stick into the coupler]. Available languages were a BASIC interpreter, and PDP8 and 10 assemblers. You could call the operator to have your DEC tape mounted - but paper tape was more commonly used.
Caution: Do not stare into laser with remaining eye.
I was paid in 0-day warez and greets. Money didn't really enter the picture for me at that point. I could have made money charging for printing out papers, but back then many teachers wouldn't accept computer printouts as homework. I handed in a physics paper that I slaved over all weekend on geoWrite and geoPaint and it looked awesome but the teacher docked me one point because I didn't start the paper in class.
It amazes how little has changed really since then. Our toys are better, but overall, we still behave the same, live in the same houses, drive on the same roads, need to work 40 hours a week and eat three times a day.
Mostly random stuff.
I got more skills useful for later computer tasks HS in typing classes during the late 70's/early 80's than I did any computer class. Not that there was much in the way of computer classes offered.
In the US, in the 80s and 90s (at least, in my experience), computers were monochrome Apple IIs and eventually Macintosh SEs and they were only used for teaching students how to type (up until the fifth grade), except for the one in the library, which was used for looking up stuff on an encyclopedia on CD. If there was one in the classroom, it was usually used for one student per class (rotated through) to play Oregon Trail or this game I can't really remember that had something to due with dolphins becoming president.
mid-40's here, I went to an upper-middle-income public school in the northeast... they installed a "computer room" full of apples about a year or so after I graduated. Otherwise the only computer you ever saw was the one that the office used to do grades and payroll. There weren't any classes on it. We did, however, have some excellent formal logic classes via the English and Maths dept.
C|N>K
Junior year we had the new DEC PDP-8e. Single platter disk drive Mini. Took BASIC course that year. Next year they offered the advanced course for the first time. Took that. Senior year took third at the state math fair with a game program. Paper tape backup (still have some) Studied some of the assembler, and was one of a handful of students allowed to boot toggle the machine.
Today Database Adminsitrator for a fortune 10 company, BSCS, MBA, have spoken at an international conference several times.
Also, in 8th grade we did one section in programming in the advanced math class - by punched cards - Fortran
Between sophmore and jr years in HS actually did a short session of a couple weeks and programmed for the US government (fortran).
Learned programming more from my Dad (he had been in the field since about 1961)
Early TRS -80 in the house in 1977
This doesn't directly answer the question but my two cents is to pursue an applied degree in something other than CS.
I self-taught myself BASIC in gr5/6, mostly on the Vic-20 and TRS-80. After that my main relationship with computers was to play Earl Weaver Baseball. In high school I focused on music, socializing, cross-country, math and physics in no particular order. I didn't program again until university, where I pursued first computer engineering (B.Eng.) and then computer science- robotics and machine learning (MSc/PhD). Everything I really needed to know about how to really program a machine was in a single 4-th year OS course where I learned how to fork() in C, and the basics of concurrency.
My honest recommendation is that schools should de-emphasize technology and establish rock-solid basics in math and science. And music: no one should finish school without learning to play an instrument...
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
I graduated from high school in a small town north of Milwaukee, WI in 1975. I was a chemistry and physics geek at the time, but also spent a lot of time in the school’s electronics lab, where I built a 4-bit counter out of relays and light-bulbs. That was the closest they came to anything digital as far as actual classes. They mostly were in to building radios from scratch out of vacuum tubes and transistors.
As a junior my parents got me a TI-SR50 calculator right after I had mastered the slide rule. As a senior in a class called “Intensive Physics” they had a TI-SR52, which was my first intro to programming and I never looked back. A few years later I was coding away in assembly language on Intel 8085s and Motorola 6800s. Still coding and loving it to this day on things such as the Spring Framework.
In the mid 1980's as part of some gifted program in Baton Rouge, I learned Logo. I think that was part of a Summer enrichment program. I don't remember what kind of computers we used.
I taught myself TI-99/4a BASIC.
In the late 1980's, there was a computer in my middle school algebra classroom which was really just an excuse to goof off.
In the early 1990's, in high school at LSMSA, I learned Pascal on a VMS terminal.
Given where I was and when I was there, I fell into this gap between "everyone should know how to use a typewriter" and "everyone should know how to use a keyboard", so I never had to take a typing class. I think most of my classmates and I would have been insulted to have had to take one of these "How to use MS Office" courses I hear about.
I graduated high school in 1988. In my high school classes, they taught Cobol, Fortran, and Basic.
I currently work in the local school district at the junior high. My husband works at the high school. This is what is taught.
7th grade is a typing program that teaches the kids to type.
8th grade they learn how to make posters and fliers with MS Word. They also have to pick a cartoon picture from the internet and then try to draw it using MS Word. Their last project is creating a PowerPoint.
9th grade they learn how to make a comic strip (iirc it's in MS Word), they learn how to use Excel, and practice their typing skills.
10th-12th grade consists of programming classes. I'm not sure of everything they do, but the young man I mentor is currently learning Visual Basic 6. Even though there are 3 grade levels here, the school only has Programming I and II. At some point, they will also learn Java, Flash, graphic design, podcasting, HTML, CSS, and how to build web pages. I think they will also use Macromedia stuff for creating web sites. I'm just not sure which order the stuff is taught in.
Seriously, the classes were how to type. That's it. And yes, it's amazing how accurate your results can be when you know enough to modify the app in the first place. Sector editing assembly on an Apple ||++
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
I learned that the urge to boast of questionable accomplishments - such as spoofing the Novell login sequence to capture passwords - leads to one getting caught. Therefore the most important lesson was that real hackers don't talk - they just do.
And if you forgot to erase the clay slate? Man, you'd be out in the school's livestock pen plucking goose quills all day!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Oh sure, we had a few computing classes but since I was years ahead of the class it didn't teach me anything. But I did have the displeasure of using a Tiki 100, though they were already a decade out of date by then.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
1971 graduate here
We learned how to use a slide rule!
I had my father's old one, it had an ivory face that I could not appreciate at the time.
I'm 39(!) now so I did the school thing in the 80s mostly.
My elementary had C-64s, mostly due to fund raising efforts by the Parents Auxiliary (PTA/School Council/etc.) In the first few grades the teacher's didn't know much, and most of my 'education' came in giving tech support to the teachers as I had one at home.
Mostly they were running software from the Commodore educational software bundle. (Oregon trail! Never mind that we're Canadian students and the Chilkoot trail would have been more topical) Also I remember playing quiet a bit of artillery duel.
That continued to about grade 6 where I met a teacher who had actually decided that this was interesting stuff. He got deeply into Logo, and taught us all the basics of procedural programming using it.
This continued until highschool where we moved to PS/2 systems, and the wonders of Netware. By this time computers had become more mainstream and the games were being traded in the halls. None in the computers at school tho.
One of my teachers had a rule - if he caught you playing games in class, he'd take your 3.5" floppy and stab it with a pin about 10 times. If it still worked, you could use it.
Of course I gamed that system. Brought in two identical floppies. One pre-holed, formatted to map out the bad blocks and games installed after bad blocks were marked out. The other was pristine. When the teacher caught me and stabbed the disk, I swapped it with the working one, and miracually it worked.
I suspect I got away with it because the teacher knew full well he wasn't teaching me anything (by this point I was running a fidonet node (if you don't know what it is, look it up you whippersnapper :)) and using material from the echomail in school reports, with proper attribution of course :). Was always cool when I could include in a current affairs report the viewpoints of people living through the events.
In typing class we were still using C-64s. My big irritation there was that the software they were using disabled the backspace key and COUNTED HITTING IT AS AN ADDITIONAL TYPO. Because typewriters don't have backspace keys.
Fortunately the software was written in C-64 basic so I found the code and 'fixed the bug for them'... I may not have asked for recognition for my work tho! :).
Next up was Grade 10/11 Comp sci. Here we met Turbo Pascal. Again I outpaced and discovered Advance Placement Comp Sci which is how I finished my high school CS classes.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
{ } The null set: that set of empty braces is as close as it came. Little did I suspect this was an introduction to the concept of "stubs" for missing code that might be written at some leter data!
...bore absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to computer skills I needed for work.
Thank you, Acorn, for fucking up an entire generation of what could have been a paradigm shift in artificial intelligence programming. Now we have to put up with an overpriced POS phone which only understands you if you speak into it with a faux-American accent.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
In elementary school, in third grade, we learned BASIC.
In Jr. High I learned LOGO.
In High School they offered autocad, office, and typing.
This will not stand :(
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Memories of deleting the "At Ease" security program on the school Macs using the "delete a file" option in Excel. :)
Memories of getting busted for trying to pirate Visual Basic 4.0 from the school PCs.
Memories of the school being hooked up to the Internet for the first time (via a 64k ISDN line no less)
Memories of "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing". Still cant touch type in the way that program teaches you but I can type pretty fast
Memories of design technology classes that had PCs so old they featured CD-ROM drives with caddies.
Memories of programming classes learning Pascal and later Visual Basic and always being ahead of the class.
Memories of being allowed to do tests and exams and things on computer because my writing is as good as unreadable.
in 1979, in year 5, we did in class for loops + print on punch cards. in 1982, in year 8, we did in class I learned BASIC for Graphics & peek/poke. :-)
1984, I wrote lots of text adventures and vector games (with my own vector algorithms) in lunch breaks, and took the school's only computer home many weekends
in 1985, in year 11 in class , we used 6502 on Apple II to do sprites, vectors and sound, and read the source code to the Apple II in the appendix to the manual.
in 1986, in year 12, I saw a word processor for the first time, and embedded bold/italic printer commands into the text. We also got BBC Micro for better BASIC and graphics
Francis Lewis HS, a Queens (NYC) high school had a computer lab, in my sophomore year, 1972, we used what were Basically glorified calculators with a few hundred bytes of memory available for programs. The computer used marked sense cards to read in the program.
The next year we were given access to our RJE station which connected to a S/370 at CCNY. Fortran and PL/1 were used with punch cards. My final year, 1974-1975 we programed on a PDP-8E, fortran and assembler.
In 1969 our mathematics teacher introduced us to Fortran. We were allowed to run our test programs at Spadeadam (the nearby British missile development center - then mothballed). Kind of cool going through the blast doors to mission control to access the computer. How did it work out? Not so well, I'm still programming :).
I went to high school in the late 1980s and my high school was still dominated by Apple II computers. By that time I had already been writing programs in Turbo Pascal. Through my highschool years I taught myself 8086 assembly language and wrote numerous TSRs and did a lot of hacking. I never bothered with any high school computer classes since if anything they would have been limited to Logo and Basic, which I had thankfully unlearned by then. Fresh out of high school I got an summer internship working on DOS TSRs for a graphics chip manufacturer after one of my programs was brought to their attention since it caused only their graphics cards to fail horribly (rapid XOR operations or similar operations caused their cards to fail horribly in the 320x200 256 color mode).
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
I took typing in 8th grade. Because my class schedule was wrong the first day, I ended up with the sticky typewriter. Because of that, I couldn't type fast enough and I got a C in typing. (Funny because now I probably type faster than all those people.)
The NEXT year, they got Apple //s for the whole lab. Anyway, I eventually took Computer Programming (UCSD Pascal) and the teacher (a math teacher that knew almost nothing about computers), would give us 2 weeks to write a program. I would finish it in 20 minutes. That's when I figured out that I should be a software engineer.
Anyway, even though it was first period, he wouldn't let us do homework for other classes in there. So I turned my green screen all the way down and installed Ultima III, Ultima IV, Return of Heracles, Ali Baba, etc., with the SOUND OFF. I solved lots of adventure games in there.
One day he finally caught me and I got in trouble. He made me do another project. "Write a game." So I wrote a memory match game in one day. I asked for another project. And another one. Every day. Finally, he said, "OK, play your games but keep the screen low and the sound off."
I went to Homecoming 20 years later and he still remembered my name (he was my Cross Country coach also). He still teaches computers and complained to me that the kids are always trying to play games instead of working. I reminded him that I was the very first... ;)
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I was taught nothing about computers in high school, but I got to see the teletype connected to a university computer 50 miles away. It played black jack!
for some unknown reason there were IBM360 manuals at our local library and I was possibly the only one who looked at them. Computers? we had watches, and log tables and ... that was it. my first year at Electronics was done with a slide rule the second year we could have a no-programable calculator, but that was it. The year that I got married, 1978, was the year that I had a log-in and started down the slippery slope of 'personal' computing.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
We had a bunch of Apple IIes and some macs. The Apple sales rep had the entire teaching body convinced kids would never understand a PC and apple was the way of the future. They got their first PCs in the year after I graduated, thanks in larger part to a group of kids lead by yours truly that called around and polled local businesses asking what types of systems they used.
Fast forward to last week, and I was in a C# training class... along with a a lady that worked for the local school district. I asked what she did there... "I'm a programmer" she replied. So I asked why the school district needed a C# developer. She went on to explain how all the classrooms now have digital chalkboards and interactive touchscreen displays. When I asked her why they we need a $10k chalkboard, she got offended and started talking about how it has "transformed learning" yada yada yada... "Then why are GPAs lower now than they've ever been in years?" I asked her... she just stared at me blankly. And the teachers wonder why they can't get a raise. Seriously, if someone can explained to me what the hell is going on in our school system that lets them think this sort of thing does anything other than destroy their budget... How many more teachers could they hire if they didn't have this kind of garbage?
about 24 years ago, our (elective) CS class covered the basics in terms of hardware, and then went straight into programming (BASIC). Starting on IBMs, later moving to Commodore 128s. It did a pretty good job at challenging kids and getting them interested in what can be done with a computer when you know how to program it, although the exercises themselves were a bit mundane and boring if I recall correctly. This started in 7th grade, going all the way through 10th. The progression wasn't quick enough for me - there wasn't enough increase in the complexity and scope of the challenges and exercises in the later grades.
Class of 2001 here. Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania.
Middle school: Mandatory half-year touch typing course. Our class was the last to use Apple IIe's for this, before they redid our computer labs and installed Gateway machines. I'm told this is now done in the elementary schools with Alpha-Smarts. Back in my day, the elementary schools did not have enough computers for everyone to use one every day (1-2 per classroom and a single computer lab for the entire school).
9th grade: Mandatory half-year "Computer Applications" course. Touched on word processing, spreadsheets, and databases. I believe we used Works 4.0 for this.
10th-12th grade: All computer courses were elective. I think we had some advanced word processing / business courses offered, which I skipped because they weren't in my area of interest. On the programming side, our school offered half-year "intro" courses in BASIC, LOGO, and Pascal. In 1999, BASIC was eliminated in favor of VB. Full-year courses in VB and Pascal were available if you passed the intro course for that language. Also in 1999, "Multimedia" was added to the curriculum. I use that term loosely because there were two half-year courses offered: Basic and Advanced. "Basic Multimedia" was just a fancy name for Powerpoint 101; "Advanced Multimedia" was just a fancy name for Netscape Publisher 101.
During my high school career, I took all the programming courses mentioned, as well as both multimedia courses. The multimedia courses were pretty much a waste of time, since I had already more or less mastered HTML by then. I think LOGO would have served a better purpose as a middle school elective, because you can't really do anything useful with it, although it does serve as a great illustration of getting the computer to do what YOU tell it to, with instantaneous feedback. I also think BASIC was redundant because most of the concepts taught in that class were also taught in Pascal. I'm glad they switched to VB, because although it's not much use at an introductory level, it does serve as a good illustration of OOP. I think the Pascal courses were the most beneficial for teaching me HOW to program. One of the exercises our teacher had us do was to draw a chart to track the value of each variable at each line of code. I program large fire alarm systems in high-rises for a living, which mostly just use Boolean logic, but even to this day I still use that technique to track the status of each output at each line of code.
Reprise the theme song and roll the credits!
I remember first grade I had some contact with Logo on a Mac. All 20 of us around one machine and writing programs on paper to test one by one on the machine. It was a simple drawing of a house. Then nothing until first grade of high school to learn typing on 8086's in a time when 486's were top of the line. Had to load a 5.25 floppy with DOS, then the typing program. Took 15 minutes out of the 50 to get setup. Off course I had had Amiga and C64 and every x86 to 386dx with 1x external CDROM at home.
Finally in 4th grade of high school we started getting Pascal on 386 and machines and because of the courses I took, assembler and a c-variant for PIC micro controllers.
Then got dropped into the work environment when people started using .net and PHP was ubiquitous.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
PR#6
That sinking feeling deep in your gut when you KNOW you screwed up bad summed up with: {head desk} {head desk}
Quite lot actually considering our high school had precisely one Commodore PET.
In 1979 we were first taught to program in CESIL on coding forms that got sent to County Hall to be turned into punched cards for us.
In 1980 our school got it's first PET and an ASR 33 teletype connected to the Open University's mainframe.
Because we had only one PET, it (and the teletype) were kept in the store room with the maths text books but we were all encouraged to try programming it. Lunchtimes and after school (until the head of maths locked up and went home for the evening), there were always a few boys, and it was almost always boys, trying to write their own versions of Star Trek and Civil War (which were the two games the school possessed) in BASIC.
Can't imagine it now, but hopefully the Raspberry Pi will fix that.
I finished high-school in the late 80's primarily using BBC Acorn's. Our computer teacher was terrible. He told us all that learning programming was a waste of time because "computers will soon program themselves". He failed everyone in the class bar one student, who just happened to be an attractive female (although admittedly, she was pretty smart). I now make a good living as a programmer (OK, PHP script kiddy, but still).
In elementary school, we had Apple II's on which we played a few games (Oregon Trail is the only one I recall...). ONCE they sat down and showed us roughly how using a modem works, and how email works, but it was more just watching the teacher than any hands on experience, as most kids didn't have regular access to a computer yet anyhow. There was a single computer in the library (not sure what OS...probably win95) which had Grolier's Encyclopedia on CD-ROM, which I recall checking out on a few occasions.
In middle school, we were using Windows 95, and 98 as that turnover happened. We got basic typing instruction, though that seemed to be fading as this was when use of AOL Instant Messenger was taking off, and kids were showing up for typing class with precious little need to have anyone drag them through the basics. Also around this time was basic use of search engines (yahoo, excite, lycos, dogpile, altavista, and this NEW one with the weird name of "Google" that one of the teachers had stumbled upon while surfing in their free time...). Throughout middle school, we also got periodic instruction in use of MS Word and Powerpoint, with perhaps a dusting of Excel once or twice (more for making graphs than anything else).
High school was where I got regular access to the Internet at home, and I was fairly late in my town to be getting it (we'd had computers all my life growing up, but they were all old by the time I even got to any playing with them (think Commodore 64 in 1993), other than the Pentium I box we got in 1996 with a modem that only worked a handful of times...I suspect it was just a matter of bum hardware). In any case, High school was where we got a bit more with web research skills, use of graphics editing programs, and an elective to learn basic C++ (the only programming class offered at all). Most of the learning I did in High school with computers involved either at home stuff on my own, or hanging out with the tech club during open periods, which was quite the helpful way to pass the time that I'd recommend to any teenager looking for both technical knowledge AND a social life in high school at the same time. You might even get some inside information on how the school firewall is set up, allowing you to find interesting and easy ways to bypass it, like I did! (The firewall was port blocking, but allowed port 25. .Exe files were disallowed, but often changing the name to something like "calc.exe" was all it'd take to run say, Telnet. Telnet server on port 25 on the box at home, and voila... Anyway, obviously I'm dating myself with this one, because any kid these days would undoubtedly be able to rig up at least an SSH tunnel for a bit less awkward method of connecting out...I'm just recalling getting SSH running on our systems being a bit more of a pain than simple Telnet was...).
Anyway, I'm 26, for a reference point, and I'd be pretty horrified to hear of any school systems doing things the way they did while I was in school, but at the same time, don't actually expect that it's THAT much better, all in all.
How to load the optional cassette tape reader...
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
My experience with computers in school was entirely about locked-down window managers, and learning to type-up MS Office documents. Where the hell were these schools with actually useful computer science or IT classes?
Hell, for years I thought that Mac OS was the "At Ease" shell, the only thing students were able to get to. For Windows 9x as well, it wasn't until late in high school that I finally saw some shell other than the Novell program launcher.
For years I was trying to learn everything I could about computers... I never suceeded at convincing my parents to buy one, and didn't know of any neighbors who owned one. So, I'd sign up for every computer class offered. Through elementary, "computers" consisted of an hour of lab time each month, where we would be forced to run typing-tutor after typing tutor, and as a reward, we could click-to-paint photos. I was just as horrible a typist at the end as when I started.
In Jr High I was excited about the computer class offered. Made it my #1 elective... the class was canceled the year I started. Again, my computer experience would be limited to a little lab time for word processing. Around that point, I started clicking around, looking for ANYTHING other than the 3 programs we were given. Clicking around in Help allowed launching a few random programs here and there, but never anything interesting.
Come high school, I again signed-up for every computer class offered, and got in. First year it was some Office class, where we typed-up documents, basic spread-sheets, do some drawing, etc. It was really quite worthless, and I retained none of it.
Next year I signed-up for a CAD class that was offered. They had a few Win 95 computers in the class, but NO CAD software. My teacher made no appologies, and the class wasn't canceled, so everyone was locked in a room for an hour with nothing to do. Most talked, did homework, listened to music, and only a few used the locked-down computers for anything. The teacher had to brag about how well they were locked-down, so I had my challege. In a few days I learned about F8, and booting into DOS mode. I borrowed a friend's MS-DOS book (he didn't use) and learned the command-line. I learned the file system the hard way. I'd learn all the commands the book taught, and then I'd keep going, running every executable I could find. One of them I ran just suddenly restored the computer to regular Win 95, pre-lockdown. I was told not to touch those computers again, which developed for the first time a habbit of ditching classes (since I was guaranteed an A there) that would come back to bite me, repeatedly.
Next year, some "advanced" computer class, where the computers were running good old Win 3.1 with Netware. After a few weeks, I stumbled upon a way to break-out of the restrictions (controlled by batch files on network drives, which I was able to disconnect. First time around, I'd restarted into an unrestricted windows fileman shell, found how to send netware messages, and broadcast out something clever to everyone in the class, not realizing it would reveal the source, and I got busted within seconds. But as luck would have it, one computer wasn't booting, so my techer gave me a screwdriver, and told me to go fix it.
I had zero idea WTF I was doing. I flailed around in the dark for days, like a chimp on a bicyles, no idea about the boot process, no background to compare to. The BIOS was protected with an unknown password (no CMOS jumpers on those mobos at all). Disconnecting the battery overnight didn't even work. Disconnecting the HDD cause it to try the floppy, but I didn't know what that meant. My teacher gave me a couple disks, the worthless diagnostics disk booted, but the DOS one didn't. I had no background to tell me thee disk must have been bad, and my teacher, and computer-owning friends, never had any advice to offer. But in hindsight, it was only a minor waste of time.
I searched the web, and found several apps that claimed to recover CMOS passwords,
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
So the only exposure we had was a programmable calculator in physics class. We had to write a program to solve a quadratic equation. "No, it can't solve for imaginary roots." First of many challenges...
Mid-late 90's: We played lots and lots of SimCity :)
I graduated from high school in 86. We had one computer, a commodore CBM in junior high, which I learned basic programming on. My Dad also bought a PET for home, which I also played with. High school had a lab with about 10 CBM computers whiich had floppy drives. They also had a phone coupler and a modem. I spent most of the time in high school playing video games. It wasn't until I bought my first PC for university (AT computer) that I started learning more about computers. I later took a Comp Sci degree which filled in a lot of blanks.
In 1972 when I was a H.S. Sophomore, my High School (Cleveland Heights/University Heights High School) acquired a PDP-8e with 8k core memory & 4 teletype terminals using paper tape for program storage. It ran a version of DEC Basic. That took 20 minutes to load from paper tape after a minimal boot loader had been keyed in with the toggle switches on the front panel. Fortunately the machine was very stable because a crash meant you probably couldn't get it rebooted that class period.
Computer Science was an 9 week elective class which I took in 1973. After the mandatory "Hello World", branching, subroutine & data statement lessons, I remember having an assignment to program a craps game. I also wrote a program that punched out words on the paper tape that one of the candidates for Student Council used for mini election banners.
With only about 1.2k of ram left for each terminal after Basic was loaded and no disk storage, our programs were necessarily short & simple - but we did learn programming basics.
I graduated from New Paltz High School in the early 1990s, and they had just built a computer lab consisting of a bunch of IBM PS/2 model 40s on a token ring network with a model 80 server.
Most of the teachers there didn't know jack about computers, and decided to have a few computer nerds in our class administer the computers in exchange for Comp Sci credits.
Neither you nor gp could have learned that in high schools.
I am from the same era as you guys. I did not learn any computer stuffs when I was in my high school.
The richer kids got themselves "electronic calculators" but the rest of us were using slide rules.
I went into the "computer" thing by myself. It became my top passion at that time.
I lost count on how many time I burned my fingers while assembling the chips on breadboards on the many DIY "PC" kits I purchased (mail-order style) from ads that I got from "Popular Mechanics".
We were actually doing machine language at that point.
There were no compiler. No high level language. Not even assembly language.
There was no PDP-11, or any other DEC machine, in my high school.
The first big iron was when I went to college.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
1996, I was 13 and in Year 7. Typing classes, word processing and programming in Cobalt. I used to think it was funny changing the PSU to 110v from the native (in Australia) 220-240v and then wait for someone to switch the PC on and then I'd watch that sucker smoke! Oh, and frequently putting chewing gum in one of the daisy chains of the 10baseT coax which would in turn bring all of the PC to a screeching halt since none of the PC had hard drives and were all PXE booting off an NT server!
Yep, I was a jerk!
Back when I was in highschool you picked a specialty set of courses, the one I was in was called 'Computing and Control' which was considered a sort of a prestige curriculum at the time.
I don't quite remember the exact order of things we studied but here's an approximation:
Electricity - starting with basic circuits, resistance, capacitance and the like, up to transistors, amplifiers, diodes. (I didn't particularly like this subject)
Physics - I ended up not doing the final exam but I had enough points to graduate anyway.
Programming - We started with Pascal, that was pretty fun, while people were doing the basic assignments I figured out how to play with text and background colors and the like, made a stats calculator for an MMO I was playing at the time (Dark Ages).
Logic Gates - stuff to do with logic and logical gates, Karnaugh maps, building flipflops, shift registers, muxes, demuxes, eventually basic CPUs.
After that I believe we learned about the 8080 or 8086 CPU, its components, and its assembly language (yes, after the higher level Pascal), we also had this device that allowed us to light up LEDs and test switch states though the serial port so we wrote programs that made LEDs flash, lights that traveled across the LED array, changed speed, direction and such.
Control Theory - Well, the teacher covered some basics in this at the beginning but we were given a choice of either studying the theory and doing an exam or doing a project.
I don't remember if there any people who did the theory.
The project bit was in teams, in my case I did it with one other person, the project was a data-glove sort of device, basically a bunch of potentiometers that go on a mechanical glove device with an analog to digital converter communicating the a computer and a piece of software that displays a 3D hand with a corresponding state.
My partner did the electronics and mechanics and I did the software which is all I really enjoyed, now this was in VB6, since that's what our teacher could help us with but I had to learn DirectX on my own, figure out how to import 3D objects from 3DX Max I think it was, a lot of fun.
Half the time our main teacher (his name's Menashe Shemtov) would go off on tangents, he told us how he lost his arm in the war driving a tank, immigrating from India, he's the reason I looked up and watched Soylent Green.
I really enjoyed these classes (not so much the electricity stuff).
There was also an elective project in robotics for a competition where a robot has to navigate a maze and blow out a candle, but I didn't do that.
And with all that they still decided to give us an MS Office class which was quite boring and useless.
I never felt there was that Nerds/Jocks divide you see in American movies, sure there was the guy who went to soccer camp or the guy who was really into history, but for the most part the people who were good at sports were also the ones who were good at math and the like.
Anyway, in the end we had diploma exams in which we'd pick three out of six subjects from a hat and do those exams, I got one in logical gates which was great because I really liked the subject, one in assembly programming which was also great and one in some subject in electricity which I guess I managed to study well enough to get a passing grade.
And that was it.
I was in the last year not to have comp sci courses at our schools in Grimsby: 1987. I had to go out on a limb to get any formal computer courses by signing up for "adult education" at the local college. Our lecturer turned out to be a former oil-tanker pilot with no desire to answer the question "what programming experience do you have?" other than "I was an oil-tanker pilot".
We were taught that basic was a high level language that was the mainstay of business programming; that assembly language, like machine code, was being phased out; "C" outright didn't exist; it was physically impossible to connect two computers together.
So when he flat out refused to grade my programming project - I gave him the option of either a multi-player BattleShips or the BBC Basic terminal app that allowed the other player to participate, both of which were written, tested and documented - I decided not to take the exam.
-Oliver
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
I live in Taiwan and graduated from HS about 3 years ago. We had computer classes in our 1st year. They taught us how to click-and-drag and write a few lines of BASIC (I've forgotten it all since then). On another note, apparently the guy responsible for our school's infrastructure was an MSCE, so we got to learn about Microsoft Access and SQL during the computer club sessions which I attended.
I make hardware RNGs, which give 2.5849625 bits of entropy per use in theory (actual performance dependent on usage).
I'm 43 (class of '87) and went to high school in Layton, Utah, USA.
There were various business-oriented computer classes, including a word processing class I took which was taught on a shared minicomputer with 3270 green screen terminals. There was also an introductory programming class, which I didn't take, and an AP Computer class, which I did take. It was a programming class, using Turbo Pascal on IBM PC XTs. As a class project we attempted to build a schedule management application for the school. We failed to produce anything usable, but learned a lot in the attempt.
I think the programming classes were uncommon in the district, though. My high school had them because we had a computer teacher who had become independently wealthy from a couple of startups in the early 80s (hardware-focused, I think) and had decided to take a few years off to teach. He was an electrical engineer, but knew a fair amount about basic programming and liked computers, so he convinced the administration to offer some programming classes.
Oh, there was also a graphic design class which used a computerized typesetting machine. I guess that would count also. I did that as well.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
We learned to program in BASIC first on TRS-80s from Radio Shack, then on a PDP1134 using dumb terminals. I never thought I'd use it professionally, but we learned to write games, steal passwords, spoof e-mails. I moved on and thought no more about it.
Fast forward 8 years; B.S. in biology, 2 years as a lab tech in molecular cardiology, an MBA and I walk into a temp job where they are using Business Basic on a mini-computer. I ended up running the IT department. After 4 years of that I moved on to owning a software and web development company. Aside from picking up a CNE to run our Novell Network no other formal training. I sold the company in 2003 and work part time now, by choice.
Not bad payback for a high school semester. The key, in my opinion, was a good teacher that encouraged us to play and students that loved to fool around with the computers.
Sorry, didn't mean to post as an anonymous coward. Clearly, I did not learn quite enough it that class after all.
I went to a magnet program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Advanced_Technologies) so my experience isn't exactly representative of the typical public school curriculum. If I remember correctly, the breakdown was:
Freshman year: basic usage (Office, Photoshop, etc) and "intro programming" (Karel)
Sophomore year: Fortran, Pascal, intro C
Junior year: C++ (AP Comp Sci A)
Senior year: No required programming courses, but I took an elective course in OpenGL 1.2
We also had a fairly comprehensive math program to go with it. Algebra II, Geometry, Pre-Calculus and either AP Calc AB or AP Calc BC depending on your performance in Pre-Calc.
It was a pretty sweet program. The research lab there was better equipped than some of the engineering labs I used in college.
Class of '93 for high school... We learned darn near nothing. I recall some VERY light Word Perfect use for one class I can't remember...
Also a teacher that let us set up Scorched Earth (before school started in the morning) on a classroom computer with all computer players playing at full speed during class with no monitor/sound turned on. We'd save the "saved game" file and take it home to have lots of money to splurge.
I had a sucky sig.
In fourth grade, we had an Apple II that was shared among about 20 classrooms. Nobody, not even the teachers, were allowed to touch it, ever, for fear it would get broken. The thing was never used. It may have been broken given that we never used it.
In middle school, I got a two weeks of typing class before they decided that was a scheduling mistake and I was really supposed to learn Spanish.
I did not learn Spanish. But that two weeks of typing taught me enough about keyboarding to make me a furious typist on my own and that, in turn, led to building my own PC at home, teaching myself how to use it (DOS in those days) and eventually various computer and IT jobs where ability to type is essential and ability to type like a madman is a plus. It comes in handy.
So I think a lot of my work success can be traced back to the merest fragment of a skill I got from two weeks of typing. The rest was my own initiative.
Sig for hire.
We had a decent sized lab of cheap (well.. low end, i'm sure they cost plenty) Macs. This was a small town highschool with maybe 500 students and we probably had 50 machines in the lab. We were taught typing, basic word processing and spreadsheets. The only programming instruction was a new class that they offered my senior year: Hypercard. I took it, and while the instructor was clearly over his head, he did make an honest effort. Unfortunately Hypercard was not an ideal platform to teach programming, and I doubt anyone in the class really learned much that was useful.
-Lod
On punch cards. I had already taken a FORTRAN class (offered at a local college) the previous summer, and was teaching myself BASIC and 8080 assembly language on the side, so the high school FORTRAN class didn't really do much for me. At least it was an easy A.
When my son was in high school he took classes in Visual Basic and Java.
BTW, why no "50-year olds" in your list of age ranges? Are we too old to be reading /.?
I was in high school from 1999 to 2001, in France. There was two or three computers in the libraries to search for books and that's all. Education was all about pen and paper, chalkboard and long hours. I would get bored by the slow pacing especially in physics / chemistry.
In middle school there are courses named "technology" where we would be taught basic technical drawing, soldering, making a crude PCB etc., now that was pretty interesting. There was a bit of computer use :) but one class was about typing and printing a letter on 286s and 386s, the other one a few years later we used networked french 8 bit computers (the network was just to stream software from an XT server) and was an educational program about tricky front/top/side views of 3D shapes.
I was 1st exposed to computers in 3rd grade, which started in September '82 for me. We had Commodore's, with two big floppy drives. They even gave each of us students a disc to keep stuff on. We were taught a little BASIC, but not enough to actually make anything useful. Beyond that, I remember us playing a "Where in The World Is Carman Sandiego?" game a lot. That was about it.
After 3rd grade, I don't remember touching another computer 'til 1986 when my parents bought a TRS-80 from Radio Shack. I was more interested in the games then (Downland, Megabug, Pyramid, etc). We might've used computers between those two times, but if we did then it wasn't anything memorable.
Next time I remember using one in school, was in late '89 (10th grade). when I took a typing class and our English teacher had us using some MS-DOS programs for something. I was so clueless about how to use those programs and a computer for anything other than games, that it made me hate computers. At the time, I was into guitar & alternative music (which was still referred to as College Rock and Modern Rock at the time).
That was about it. I don't remember any other instances of the school trying to get us accustomed to computers. Although, they kept drilling it into us that we need to learn to use them 'cause they'll be very important in the future and for getting jobs.
Have one typing class on a commodore 64 in grade seven, but in high school the only computer experience I got was programming my TI-85 in basic and my mom glt me the pascal module so I did a little of that, otherwise I didnt touch a computer until university.
Elementary school in France in 1985: there was a national effort called plan informatique pour tous (computer science for all plan). Children had access to computers one afternoon per week and learned procedural programming in Logo. On the contrary, computers were completely absent from high school afterwards.
I was told that they were huge things that sometimes even took up entire air conditioned buildings, and they had thousands of tubes and relays.
(I graduated in 1964...)
In 1973 I attended an average high school (Kettering) in an average school distict (Waterford) in an average state (Michigan) which deviated significantly from the average when it came to STEM education for motivated students. Some high schools in the disctict had a room full noisy paper TTYs connected to a remote server that was often down or overloaded. One math teacher at our school learned that the district's original accounting computer, a relic IBM 1401, was underutilized and was so primitive it could not be connected to remote TTYs. It supported only one TTY, that being the main operator's console.
All program and data entry had to be done via Hollerith punched cards and the associated card punch machines. We learned FORTRAN IV using pre-printed pads that were ruled like the top line of the Hollertih cards, with the columns labled in the fixed-line format of early FORTRAN. We had classes at our school, and once each week we were bused to the District Administration Center, where we would punch our cards, add the "magic job cards" to the beginning and end of our stacks, then stack them in the hopper next to the console.
Then we'd hover over the line-printer, waiting for the JCL lines showing the progress of our stacks, starting with them being read, the compiler being loaded, the binary being saved (to a DRUM memory), then, if all had gone well, the compiler being unloaded and our binary being loaded into working memory and run. After we each had completed several assigned programs, we were then able to select our own problem, then design and implement the code needed to run it.
My first truly independent program was taken from my biology class, a formula with 26 factors used to calculate rat metabolism (yes, we raised and monitored lab rats). Calculating this formula by hand was tedious and error-prone. My program made it almost trivial, working either from canned data on cards, or able to prompt the user for data on the system console.
I remember watching the lights on the 1401's status/logic board blink as it executed my program, seeing each major logic unit activate as it was used by the program, and seeing everything pause while waiting for user input.
Even then, we knew we were using the computing equivalent of a horse and buggy, but we didn't care. We had a system of our own, shared among less than 20 students, with the freedom to explore, fail, debug, and repair our programs. In today's terms, I'd say we felt and acted like hackers, reverse-engineering a complex system for which we didn't have access to all the manuals.
I still have the card deck for that program, wrapped in a folded printout from a run that I turned in as a biology assignment.
We didn't just learn "about" computers and programming: We learned how to USE a computer.
That one class set the course for my professional life, something for which I am and shall always be exceedingly greatful.
the normal curriculum generally didn't provide any exposure to computers beyond "Keyboarding" and "Computer Applications," meaning MS Office. I graduated from high school in 2006 and there was really nothing made widely available by my school. There was a vocational class for computer operations (only 4 students including myself took it), which was actually quite useful -- intro to networking concepts, intro to programming (VB 6), and all of the information needed to get CompTIA's A+ certification. Throughout the year, I was able to bat ideas around with the teacher, including the idea of making a beowulf cluster (just 3 or 4 nodes) to showcase some of the things computers could be used for. The class was the last half of the day and really helped solidify my basis into computing. At one point, the teacher had the network engineer for the school system come in to teach us how to terminate fiber (which we later ran to provide network access for the machine trades vocational class). I really have some fond memories of that class and to this day, I'm friends with the teacher.
My experience was *not* normal by any stretch, though. As I mentioned, there were only 4 students (later dropped down to just 3) in the class from the entire county. I was the only person from the hosting school (1000-1500 students). The teacher I had that year returned to industry the very next year and, from what I heard, the quality of the class dropped tremendously when his successor took over. To my knowledge, the class is still the same poor quality that it was after he left.
As far as I know, learning anything related to computers in high school (in most midwest counties) is learned the same way as it was a decade or two before -- individuals being motivated to learn for its own sake and befriending others who are like-minded. LAN parties, though passed off as completely useless by parents (more often than not), provide(ed) the greatest source of computing knowledge exposure -- setting up the LAN (and segmenting it from the user's parents' use), troubleshooting why a computer would fail to work, troubleshooting why a pirated game wouldn't run on one machine when everyone else wanted to play, and understanding physical infrastructure requirements (i.e. power) are routinely dealt with in the environment of a high school LAN party, and are directly applicable to industry (with much more learning outside of these parties to fill in the gaps, of course).
If I am remembering correctly, Digital gave our school a $70,000 PDP-11/V03 as a gift (tax deduction for them) in 1975. We had three VT-52 video terminals and one Decwriter II. We were only given access to BASIC but that was enough. While it was a primitive two floppy system no hard disk, it was pretty advanced compared to home computers at the time. In 1979 I was given a TRS-80 model I for Christmas. While it was all mine, it had no disk drives, just a cassette player. In 1980 the school got four Commodore PETs and finally a full lab of 10 or more Black Apples. I was lucky to go to such a well equipped school. I learned BASIC on my own (with help from friends) and when it came around to class, I helped the teacher with class. He taught the whole class and I helped people with syntax on the exercises. I spent much of my free time on those computers programming and learning.
I was (for better or worse) exposed to an Apple II circa 1980. I was in 5th grade and was already keen on science (I was going to be a botanist), but hadn't previously known computers even existed. but got hooked immediately. There was of course little to no formal (or even informal) computer instruction, however I was lucky and had a great science teacher, who gave me (and a few other kids) time with the machines in (and after) class. Before long I was peeking and poking, and then came the vic20 and the c64 and my 99/4a. I even got to meet a PDP 11/15 that lived at our elementary school (!) for a time. But I digress. For traditional high school there was little or no opportunity to study computers, so I did the only logical thing and went to a technical school, where they had a PDP 11/44. COBOL, RPG, IBM S/36, more RPG. Then the IBM PC. More RPG, but then: Word processing. Desktop Publishing. Databases. Many software titles.
So my experience in High School was untypical for the time. Technical education? Yes it exists, but even today, not really in mainstream schools, at least not on any practical level. I think most people that got into computers, whether it was 1980, 1990 or 2000, or 2012 for that matter, got sucked into them one way or another.
There are some great teachers out there that have guided kids one way or another into technical understanding of computers and related systems but I would imagine many or even most of those kids were already into them after merely being exposed to them, and were able to just figure them out on their own, at least on a "fundamentals" level. Sad that with the test-centric environment the public schools have become, the great teachers that might identify a kid interested in a particular subject that resonates with their own interests, might not have the time, or latitude, to tutor them in that direction.
Computers are also kind of ho-hum in today's world. Whereas for those of us in our 40s and 50s, when we first had access to them, we were getting to actually see and use things that (in a 5th graders mind) only Sci-Fi TV characters and real-life mad scientists got to play with. So there was a sense of awe I think. Today? iDevice? I'll just get an iDevice n+1 next month or whatever. It might as well be a brand of hair product. Techno-bling.
The latest computer system is hardly more than another technical commodity like a threaded screw or a formed concrete block (both world changing technical achievements). It is a thing that can be mostly taken for granted by those who have always known them to exist. Which is, in some ways, tragic, since if anything, there are orders of magnitude more unexplored possibilities open now than there were 30 years ago. Though in other ways, probably exactly as it should be. Computers aren't (yet anyway) the magical creatures we dreamed them to be from exposure to science fiction and our own imaginations. They're tools, much like any other.
I guess I digressed again. Sorry about that.
Class of '81 (Go Vikings!).
Though I'd been exposed to them here and there, I wasn't really formally taught much of anything about computers in high school. My first real hands on with a computer (other than diddling with the TRS-80 on display down at the Radio Shack in Hanes Mall) was a (IIRC) four bit trainer in SWSEA (a Navy school) in the summer of '82.
In elementary school in the late 1980's, our school librarian of all people -- a nice, fun older lady -- taught us LOGO programming. The class went relatively deep given that the students were all eight or nine years old. Our last assignment was to write a function that would draw a regular n-gon (taking n as a parameter), then incorporate that into a recursive function that would draw arbitrarily deep spirograph-type shapes using a callback function. Pretty much everyone figured it out on his or her own, as I recall. Our "computer lab" at the time consisted of someone going and setting up folding tables in a hallway or the cafeteria and then lugging a bunch of Apple //e machines out of a closet, then tearing the whole setup down after a couple of hours.
In middle school, we had a short unit on BASIC programming, by now on the Apple IIGS. By this time it was the late 1990's, and I'd started teaching myself QBASIC on our home PC; the computers we were using in school were around seven years old by this point.
In high school, I took a semester of computer science as a freshman and a year of "AP Computer Science" as a sophomore. This was largely just indoctrination into OOP. The entire course consisted of writing completely trivial C++ programs which would consist of several objects, none of whose member functions exceeded one or two lines. Nobody really enjoyed the course or learned much of anything, but we were pretty much bound to the AP curriculum so there wasn't much that could be done.
Had I my druthers, I'd design a computer science program for schoolkids by focusing more on the sort of stuff I did as a little kid, which was really conceptually much deeper and certainly a lot more fun.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
When I graduated High School in 1995 the only computer course we had were using Apple IIe's with some Basic and some Turbo Pascal programming. The funny thing is the Industrial Arts class had Macintosh Classic's and we were using Claris Works.
Freshman year: nothing
Sophomore year: Hypercard (yeah, yeah read on) first half of year - into to C second half of the year
Junior Year: Continued C first half of the year - C++ second half of the year
Senior Year: Continued C++ first half of the year - Visual C++ second half of the year
When I entered college they had me skip the 100 level classes based on my HS education. Which was nice because I ended up taking more 400 level classes later. What I found interesting was that until I got to college I thought this was the standard CS curriculum everywhere. For that matter I thought the curriculum for all subjects were the same across districts. I will say that I am grateful for the education I was provided and that it is amazing that in 2012 the town I live in now (not in PA) does not even have a CS curriculum.
Well, not too much officially.
The official curriculum consisted of some application specific learning. Standard stuff for the time, Visicalc, AppleWorks, etc... When the PC lab got built, it was the same deal there. Practical learning, skills based, focused on using the computer to do something specific.
It also included some real basics on computers. The parts of them, things about data, floppies, backups, etc... Not too much, other than care and feeding of the computer and some understanding of what makes it do what it does.
Our labs were Apple ][ series machines, one PC AT / XT lab, and a Mac or two hidden away for special things, LOL!
Unofficially?
Anything and everything. One educator there was very fond of putting students into interest groups where he would then enable that learning, whatever it was. For me, and a few peers, this was golden! I've written this here a time or two, but can't find it at the moment, so I'll just summarize:
We got a few rules. State what we wanted to do, state why, sell that, then do it and move onto the next thing. In a few years, we got through programming in BASIC, LOGO, PASCAL, 6502 assembly. We also got to explore CP/M and compare / contrast to the Mainframe we could dial up running UNIX, and Prodos and our own home computers, whatever they were.
It ended up being a mini comp-sci course, where we worked from books, photocopied data sheets, and long hours on black boards working out binary math for various things. A few of us ended up teaching courses too for senior projects and such. Mine was LOGO programming, and it was a pretty successful course with most students able to write some spiffy programs.
While this was going on, those of us really interested were scoring info wherever we could. Magazines at the corner market, photocopies made from the University library, and documentation requests from various companies. Moto sent me out their 6809 / 68K programming reference just for the asking! Rockwell sent us data books too. Damn cool time.
For those that got after it, some seriously good learning happened. For the ordinary student, it was less than stellar, though they did at least get some seat time and basic literacy skills.
I went on to start into manufacturing, knowing enough to tackle things like paperless drawings and CAD and Internet in 91. Automation systems of various kinds, G-code, and filters / plotters to evaluate that stuff happened too. I often wrote in basic back then, just because it was good enough, but Turbo Pascal was the real tool. High School was enough to continue directly, which is what I and a few peers did, all having tech-oriented jobs today doing various things. Invaluable frankly.
Coupla notable things:
1. The math teacher was down on binary. "Who uses that esoteric number system?"
2. Took a class in mechanical drafting, then got exposed to some early CAD. I finished that class with an F, because it was much more useful to lay out D&D maps... The CAD ended up being a career as I could use CAD leaving High School, and did right away in a manufacturing context, later on engineering.
3. Some learning was different. Today, kids are often taught Microsoft Word. Back then we were taught what a word processor was, it's functions, etc... Then we got exposed to some word processors. Same with operating systems, and all manner of things. There is a perspective that comes with learning that way I find extremely valuable today. My own kids didn't get that from school, but did at home, of course.
Lots of things didn't happen yet. Internet was not really deployed on a wide scale, meaning one basically got online through University, or via some expensive service, or through a BBS gateway, etc... My experiences there were outside of school. The same is true for storage, networks, etc... All mostly missing, due to the time frame. No educating was done on this, but to explain the dial up to the University to tap the mainframe. (And the damn thing printed on big paper, such a waste... They could have attached a VT100 or something for a much better experience, something I didn't know until after leaving.)
Blogging because I can...
I entered Kindergarten in 1985, can't remember if it was there or in 1st grade, but we got to play with LOGO and learn how to type (granted, I had a computer at home so I could already type). Didn't really touch computers in the classroom again until middle school where we had mandatory computer classes. The mandatory computer classes were typing and programming in BASIC (final project was in computer graphics, we had to make a short animation (~1 minute)). This was probably around 1992 or so. In high school, all computer classes were elective though programming in Pascal and C were offered, around 1995, additionally we had a digital electronics course. The rest of the computer courses offered were "productivity" courses, ie spreadsheets word processing, etc.
This was upstate NY, for geographical reference.
1986 I was still in highschool. Our school brought in a few Casio (I think) PCs with the monochrome monitors.
We learned to program basic on them. It was great. Learned logic and helped with maths.
I remember we had one of these PCs connected to a TV and a tape player where we would read programs from. This is where we did the colour graphics.
I've loved working with computers and programming from that day on.
That was my introduction to computers. I only knew 3 people who had computers at that time.
I did not get to use computers again until I went to university in 1991 where we used Apollo then DEC 320(?) which had Mosaic.
In the university library they had Apple macintosh computers with Netscape Navigator. They were the easiest and best to use.
I graduated high school in 1996, but had taken the computer classes before then, so this was from somewhere around 1992-1994.
I remember two computer classes at my high school; one was a "basic computing" class that taught us how to use MS-DOS and MS Works; the other was a business computing class that taught some simpler Pascal programming (with Borland's Turbo Pascal).
I graduated High School in 1980. Personal computers were exotic, expensive things. I knew no one, in a fairly affluent town, who had one.
What we got: A DEC PDP-8e. A bit wider than a refrigerator. OS and languages loaded via magnetic tape.
Five teletypes with rolls of beige paper. Two-character variables. Program storage on strips of yellow paper.
snarks > /dev/null
When I was in high school in 1958, they had typewriters, but learning how to type was for the girls. I went and studied electronic engineering, but in the 60s, everything was still analog. My first computer experience came when I was in my 30s. This was when I started designing electronic circuits using the SPICE program from the University of California. That program was running on an IBM mainframe, their system 360/370. Later, I learned how to control electronic measurement and power supply apparatus using DEC computers. Because computers were slow in those days and did not have much memory, I learned how to write special, efficient assembly language programs, especially device drivers for instruments. I also had fun with one of our graduate students working on a few games which ran on the mainframe. He had brought the code from MIT and we both worked on them to get it running on the IBM. When there was an open house on family day, we set up a number of terminals in various public areas, where the kids from all the families could play a few games. They were a big hit, even though they were all text based, because almost all terminals were not of the graphic type. Now I am retired and enjoy reading about the tremendous advances in technology, including Slashdot.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
I went to high school in the early 90s, and I wouldn't be where I am today without my HS CS classes. Over 3 years, our CS classes covered everything from the inner workings of hardware to binary arithmetic to complex data structures to various standard algorithms and designing and writing our own applications. The only downside is that it was all procedural programming right when OOP was becoming the new standard. Still, it provided an excellent foundation for a career in software development.
Since there was no established curriculum at the time, our class was the guinea pig. The hubris of youth led me to believe that it was my own cognitive abilities that were responsible for grasping the material at the time. Not to sell myself short, but in retrospect it takes a brilliant mind to explain complex concepts in a way that they seem simple and intuitive, and to competently explain their role in the bigger picture, and that's what she did. I've had some good teachers (and professors) over the years, but looking back, she was probably the only *great* one. I have no doubt she could have been pursuing a more lucrative career than teaching some snotty teenagers (and oh, were we snotty), so I'm grateful to her for her efforts, and I hope she's been well rewarded.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I was doing machine code stuff (assemblers were expensive) in high school - nothing complicated, but enough to get an idea of how to do it. Now it seems the kids get some half-arsed partial instruction on how to use a spreadsheet that means they still can't quite use it properly.
Eight-inch floppies that booted the UCSD p-System on a Western Digital Pascal Microengine. I wrote a 3-D tic-tac-toe game in Pascal.
I'm in high school now and the equipment is quite sufficient for learning on. Just last year we got some hyper threaded single core Pentium 4 systems for the computer science room. The curriculum for classes such as computer engineering and computer science cover a substantial amount of ground. Programming is taught in java and while it teaches a lot about the basics, more advanced concepts are in my opinion poorly taught by relying on Java's vast library of classes. The other course, Computer Engineering is quite vast in its coverage of computer related fields. It covers computer problem diagnosis and repair to Boolean algebra.
A small amount of HTML. That is about it. There was CS classes but I didn't take them. I think those were pretty much glorified business classes: how to do the books with excel etc. That said the internet for civilians was about 2 years old and we only had a single computer that was on the net so people weren't exactly nuts for computers yet.
I was taught in high school that one day powerful computers handling thousands of calculations per second would be shrunk down to the size of a typical closet! ... you insensitive ageist clods!
(that was a joke, by the way)
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
in novell netware at age 15 that allowed privilage escalation I was taught I could be suspended for a week from school. I learned how to copy the encyclopedia in a cramped and stinking trailer, onto lined parchment until my arm ached in defiance of the biblical retribution which had been prescribed..
I learned to stop exploring most things that had to do with computers after that. Unlearning this has proven quite challenging.
Good people go to bed earlier.
We did C64 BASIC in some class I had in middle school. I had a low opinion of these things, since I had a TRS-80 Color Computer at home, which I perceived to be a superior platform (perhaps erroneously, in retrospect). In high school, the "computer science" class had an Apple //e or two, while they had the most low end available IBM PS/2s in the business classroom as part of the vocational education program; for teaching kids Word Perfect and so forth.
The official curriculum had something to do with writing stuff in either Apple BASIC or maybe Apple C on the //e, but I hated that green monochrome POS, and insisted on doing all my projects in Turbo BASIC and later Turbo Pascal on my PC at home, and bringing them to school on a floppy to run on the PS/2 in the business classroom.
Thinking back, I don't guess I was taught in high school so much as I taught my teacher.
Basic 'Hello World' stuff on an Apple IIe starting around 9th grade. This would have been fall of 1983.
Born in 1975. Attended public magnet schools for grades 6-12 in the United States. First programming / computer science class was in either 6th or 7th grade; I forget which. BASIC programming on TRS-80s. In 9th grade it was Pascal programming on PCs using Turbo Pascal. 10th grade was more Pascal IIRC. At some point I took an AP course where we spent some time learning Fortran on dumb-terminals hooked up to an old VAX. Also learned a (very) little bit of x86 assembly.
It's hard to say how the 'High School' thing works. In India , you go to what is called a 'Higher Secodary School' at ages 10-15. Then, we learnt GW-BASIC.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
The Home PC did nor exist then.All we has were CB and HAM radios
Geek Hillbilly
I grew up in Haiti and we mainly learned how to type and basic Microsoft Office Products. In 9th grade we started with Publisher making Flyers. Continued with FrontPage where we made simple websites. At that time, I already had some html knowledge and used Photoshop and Dreamweaver and some manual html edits to complete my project. Our teacher the next year was a friend of mine who was an undergraduate student in Computer Science at a local University. He tried to teach the class about relational databases using Access. Unfortunately, most of the class was not able to follow along so we switched to spreadsheets using Excel. Mind you, I feel I was privileged enough to have access to a computer at home while most of the class didn't. I also had an interest in programming while most of the others were not very interested. This was at a private catholic school. Ironically enough, a good number of my former classmates studied computer science at University both in Haiti and abroad.
We made punch card decks to run assembly language on the school district's IBM 1440. We made the cards after hours, when the computer input class wasn't using them. They had a Fortran compiler but we were told the huge deck of cards made it not feasible for student programs. This was the project of a counsellor, and the grade didn't count in our average.
My program was Conway's Life, and I got it to run.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Fortran II (?) on a CDC-1700 using an IBM keypunch for punching the cards. Location was CDC's La Jolla office on what is now Eastgate Drive about a block east of Genessee.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
The AP pascal class had them writing recursive descent parsers in pascal, which would have been moderately neat in high school.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In about 1973 the local education authority for my school bought a HP 9830A. It's less of a computer, more of a jumped up calculator, but was programmable in Basic. We had it for half a term, then it went on to the next school. A year or so later, we got it permanently. None of the teachers knew what to do with it, but I latched on to it, and it being a boarding school I was able to play with it in the evenings. I taught myself from the manual, and wrote a noughts and crosses program. Other pupils joined me, and we ended up writing a program to analyse the alignment of stone circles in Cumbria and compare the number of ley lines that could be drawn through them with randomly generated positions. We went on to enter and do well in both a Computer Weekly "Win a Computer" competition and the BBC "Young Scientists of the Year".
High school, nothing! We didn't have required computer classes IIRC, BUT they were required in junior high/middle school. They had typings and Apple Works. In my sixth grade class, I had an awesome teacher named Mr. Mangel. He taught us LOGO (had one of those robotic turtle plotters!), edutainment games (Oregon Trail!), etc. Fun times. I wonder if he still around or even on /. ;) I also took BASIC for kicks.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
We had an Interdata 7/16 and an Apple ][. We learned BASIC on the Interdata (using a book by Bob Albrecht as the textbook) but they didn't really have a curriculum for the Apple so we just played with it. It made better video games. I wrote a mutant version of Pong that let you shoot your opponent with a laser beam.
I liked the Interdata better because it had actual ASR-33 teletype consoles (two of them!), and I could keep my output. Plus you could list your programs to paper tape, and not have to type them in again! I wrote a program that punched human-readable letters into the tape, so I could make banners such as "CHARLIE WATTS IS GOD".
We didn't use the computers to learn to type - we had a lab full of actual typewriters for that. I took Computer Science instead because I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone. Silly me - the computers didn't have lower case.
Our highschool here runs the small schools program, and my son is enrolled in the liberal arts school. It's his freshman year, and IMO our tech curriculum is pretty kick-ass. Not only did he cover the basics of computers, technology, and programming in middle school already - but for the next four years he's able to take game development classes focusing on Unity. Way, way better than what we were rocking in the PC Jr. days when my gym teacher and my computer teacher had about the same technical skill set.
We had one class in the "normal" high school. 8-bit computers of course. The teacher was a consultant most of the time, teaching part-time probably out of love for the subject. That made it a fun class. His coverage of sorting algorithms was memorable for two reasons: first, there was a cool film that showed lots of algorithms and how they worked, graphicly. The end of the film showed them all "competing" with eachother on the same data set, with red binnned data. Anybody remember that? The 2nd reason it was memorable is that our implementation of quicksort on the hardware was SLOWER than bubblesort. To this day, I'm not sure if it was our poor understanding of the algorithm, or if the hardware or language was actually bad when it came to a naive implementation of quicksort. The important takeaway there was that algorithms are one thing, but it's possible to run into practical issues even if you have a good algorithm.
For my last year of highschool I was at TJHSST, as part of the "senior experience". I really had a lot of issues in HS and I just want to say that TJ was a good thing; but because of all the other issues I prefer to *forget* HS. Anyway, we got exposed to networking there; but I don't think Unix was involved. Frankly, I couldn't tell you because it's all rather hazy now. The school was also just being built at the time, so everyone including the teachers were "freshman" even if they were "seniors".
Anyway, TJ, even at the beginning had more equipment than a normal school. They acquired even more after I left.
In the 80s though, you were still mostly on my own. BASIC, Pascal, and 6052 assembly--all self-taught on the C-64. Fairfax County was probably an exception for having any computers in the schools at all.
The computer curriculum was still in its infancy. We had several Apple II and IIe systems, some with 2 5" floppy drives! I managed to learn LOGO, BASIC, PASCAL, and Assembler, all before I was 15 years old. It actually help me to do better in my math classes. For example, I was able to take what I learned in Algebra class and plot circles of random diameters and at random points on the screen as well as other geometric objects and patterns. One of my first Assembler programs on the Apple IIe was to create an animated Space Shuttle tumbling thru space. I eventually got my own Atari 800 computer and the rest is history. 300 baud modem, set up a few BBSes (the original internet) for me and my friends, etc. Good times!
My first near miss with computers was when I was still in public schools (kindergarten) and wanted to take the computers summer class my brother (in 2nd grade) was taking. (He wasn't into science). My dad had a Comadore64 and it was around 1989. My dad was a computer programmer so computers were always a part of our life.
Fast forward to late elementary school... I took my first computer class when I was about 10-11-12? (I think). One of the highschoolers was co-teaching this along with his mom. We learned a lot the capabilities of computers (a lot of inspirational stuff), and about computer hardware and just got to play around on computers.
Around 1993-4 my dad brought home a 60Mhz Pentium, I used to just stand behind my dad and watch him code and try to understand what was going on. Unfortunately, he typed way too fast and I could barely read the text on the screen before he scrolled away to another section (much less understand the cryptic text). After several months of this, I finally got up the gumption to ask him how to program. He was writing in Borland Turbo C++. He taught me some foundational basics and set me free to explore but C++ is pretty tough to start out in. Fortunately, there was a pretty nice online (not as in internet connectivity) help system built into the editor. I couldn't quite get how functions were supposed to work though. I managed to get two circles to shoot lines at each other. Unfortunately, I didn't know enough algebra to do collision detection with the circles and lines.
Later I moved on to (or regressed to) Quick Basic because it was simpler. I had in mind to make a Jumpman clone but it never really got off the ground.
One day my dad brought home Visual Basic 3. He was working on a project for his workplace and had me turn the UI specs that his employer gave him into a set of Visual Basic Forms. For the most part I did a good job but I think my dad was a little surprised when he saw the technicolor purples, greens, and bright blues I had chosen for all of the backgrounds. I was sad when he told me to change them back to more business appropriate colors.
I did start learning Visual Basic at that time. At one point there was a pretty cool capture the flag program which I wrote. Unfortunately, the code for that is lost. When I was 17 I developed a binary space partitioning program in Visual Basic. I had to be creative since VB3 doesn't support pointers. I dumped all my objects to arrays and used array indexes instead.
There were many tools that were helpful and some that were not so helpful along the way. After the computer class, my dad's copy of Peter Norton's Inside the PC was very useful for understanding PC hardware (I aced all my computer System's classes in school). Not so helpful were the Borland technical manuals on the C++ compilers (I spend a month trying to understand these very detailed manuals which were not at my level. I am now an expert in C++ scope rules but I had to learn the rest of the C++ language through other means). And there were many very useful resources on computer programming at the library.
That is about the size of my computer education through high school. I feel starting at a (relatively) early age was very good for me and hands on experimental experience is critical.
Well, if this topic don't get all the low-digit neck-beards, I don't know what will.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I am 49; my family moved to Palo Alto in 1972, while in 4th grade. They took us to a room with teletypes (hooked up to a HP 2000 computer) and let us play games on them (Hunt the Wumpus, Hammurabi, etc). In the 5th grade they taught us BASIC in math class (this was back in the days of "new math", which I had no problems with, and am quite thankful for). About this time, I discovered my father was a computer programmer, and decided that was what I was going to do ("You mean they pay people to do this?"). He made some not entirely successful efforts to teach me assembly and COBOL.
In 7th grade honors math class, we learned Minitran (a FORTRAN dialect), from which I learned that programming on punch cards sucked (you submit the program, a week later you get the result back, which usually contained a syntax error). Another student taught a class to his fellow nerds on assembly programming; we had some kind of special nerd room at our middle school which was supervised by Joan Targ (sister of Bobby Fischer, and wife of the infamous SRI psychic researcher Russell Targ; the SRI "ESP testing machine" developed at great cost, and described in The Amazing Randi's book on Uri Geller, was in this room and we played around with it all the time. There was also an unused old analog computer, to which we would randomly plug in banana cables). Jonesing for more computer time, I would hang out at my dads office when I visited him, and also at a local computer store.
By my freshman year in high school (1976), we got access to the school district HP 3000 computer; however the computer lab was closed all year because the current crop of nerds had hacked the machine so badly, they decided to wait for them all to graduate before letting students back on the machine. In my sophomore year they lets us into the computer lab, now outfitted with VDTs and 1200 baud modems (speedy!). I took the only computer programming course, taught by some math teacher, and already knew more than he did so I dropped that. Maybe the year after that, I was put in some kind of program where I went to various places after school (different Stanford labs, once at Xerox Parc) and someone would say "OK kid, why don't you write a program that does this..." and I was exposed to C, assembly, PL/Z, APL and Logo. Back at school, I made an attempt to learn SPL3000, which was hampered by a lack of manuals, or any documentation, so I looked at hex dumps of a library binary to try and figure out how to make function calls. Later we got some early personal computers, I think they were Northstars.
We had an IBM 1130 computer in my senior year. Previous years, I'm told, we had teletypes and access to the Xerox mainframe at West Chester State, but I didn't get interested until 12th grade, so I only knew the 1130. I believe it was a model 3B with the internal disc cartridge drive, 1403 model 7 printer, 1442 card reader/punch.
The Computer Science course taught us basic programming in FORTRAN IV. There was a "computer math" course by a different teacher; I don't know anything about the course, but the teacher was the guy running the whole show, including the computer club, so I knew him anyway. Most of what we did in the computer club amounted to fooling around a lot in APL and learning more detail about how the computer worked.
Bonus: The computer science teacher was young, cute, female, and single. :)
And please. I know I set myself up for a pun. Note that I spelled "basic" in all lower case. I obviously am not speaking of the programming language. Thank you.
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/1130/1130_intro.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1130
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
1974 graduate here. We didn't!
(But I still have one.)
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
When I was your age, we had to carve our own ICs out of wood!
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
The junior high computer class, in 87, was just a typing class that happened to use TRS-80s. The high school class I took my freshman year, in 88-89, used Trash 80s, also, but we actually learned some rudimentary programming. It was a joke, for me at least - I'd been programming in BASIC since I was eight (growing up the son of a programmer had its perqs). At the time, some seniors were in that class, too, and I had to help them with their homework - most had never used a computer!
Slide rules were the primary computers used in high school back in the day, late 1960's. They were awesome. The games you could play on them were almost endless, as long as you didn't play games at all.
I attended Everett High School in WA state in the late 70s, where a teacher by the name of Anthony J had taken on the task of teaching serious programming in high schools. I was taught classical algorithms and languages including BASIC, Fortran, Lisp, and PDP/8 and 6502 assembly language. I wasn't one week into my freshman year when it was clear to me what I'd be doing for the rest of my life. I checked back a few years later to see how the school was doing. Dr. J had moved on and some idiots who totally didn't get it had destroyed it all by turning typing and math into prerequisite classes for "Computers" and turning the curriculum into an abomination that taught kids that computers were about learning how to run word processors and spreadsheets. Oh well. At least I was able to make off with a huge chunk of the treasure.
Code up Fortran programme with a loop to calculate pi on coding sheets. Take it over to Corby [UK] Stewart and Lloyds, a steel mill [when we still had them] which had an ICL 1901 or 1902 with a huge drum store. Get the program punched up on paper tape and let it loop for a while, printing out iterations on a huge line printer.
Building sets of NORs into a half-adder using discrete PNP [I think..] transistors. Ruining shirts with Ferric Chloride used to etch the primitive circuits.
I was very priviledged and very lucky, posh school interested in technical things. Been interested ever since.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Upon finishing secondary school in 2006, I don't recall having being taught anything other than how to use Microsoft Office.
I'm 25 years old. Back when I was in school, it was customary to brain-damage children with BASIC (or VB).. At my first school it once got to a point of teacher giving a task, me telling him "you know I can do that" and just playing, since by then I knew it well enough just from personal experiments. It was not very educative.
Then I got into a math school, and the teacher there, who is also teaching at math department of the Moscow State University, had a different idea, and I am very grateful for that. He taught us Perl and TeX, something that still helps me a lot.
At my first 'high school' (UK Slashdotter here) we didn't learn anything apart from Microsoft Office. I moved schools for my last two years specifically to do an A level in Computing. Bear in mind that this was the only school in the area that did this course, and it consists of 50% computer general knowledge (printers, fetch-execute cycle, components, SQL, HTML, CSS) and the other half is basic programming in Visual Basic 6.
I don't have a super old school story to tell, but me and my friends, we often think of ourselves as one of the last generations that didn't grow up with the Internet and computers surrounding every aspect of life. I'm 24 now and went through the public school system in Ontario, Canada between 1994 until 2005.
br> Around the age of five, my dad brought home a 486 DX with 8 MB of RAM. I quickly became the primary user of it. There were computers at school, even as early as second grade, but it was primarily a toy for learning math, playing with art programs, using Microsoft Works, and learning typing. In the second grade I had a reputation in class for being extremely proficient with the keyboard. I think I hit maybe 40-50 WPM, which was impressive for my age back then. Nothing really interesting happened with computers throughout elementary school.
Then in middle school, I was at a school kind of reputed for technology. We played with Flash, a lot of MS Office, and a lot of CorelDRAW, which was kind of like Adobe Illustrator. There was a 'web team' extracurricular activity, which consisted of maybe the top ten to fifteen computer geeks of the middle school. That was mainly doing a little bit of HTML and a Macromedia Dreamweaver. And a lot of Unreal Tournament in our off time. We got to stay out of the cold winters in the computer lab to play with computers. Around this time I was experimenting with Linux at home so I would often putty to my home machine and go on IRC, which lead most classmates to think I was some sort of computer hacker.
In high school, computer classes was actually a kind of step back compared to middle school. I don't think the mandatory classes ever went beyond MS Office. We also did some research for science classes and such using computer. In grade 11 was when you could actually take a course called "Computer Science." My teacher taught us Visual Basic. The focus was making a usable UI most of the time. Rarely was there any math or any theoretical CS involved. It seemed like the provincial curriculum didn't really specify what exactly this course was meant to teach because a friend at another school was learning basic AI concepts and programmed a tic-tac-toe game.
By the end of high school, the closest thing to real computer science we had done was a VB6 program was computed steps in the Goldbach Conjecture. Anyone who was truly interested in computer science had self-learned skills that far outstripped the curriculum. When I entered university as a computer science student, the difference was staggering. I had probably been in the top three most respected computer geeks in high school, but I was absolutely average when I reached my university. I thought I was a real ace at computer science before, but there, I realized I had only been a child who had just experimented with programming in utterly nonsensical approaches...
Not high school - no computers then. An IBM 1620A at university - and the book "FORTRAN II" by McCracken. First program actually worked! Hasn't happened since :(
UK Computer Studies seemed to revolve around the BBC in the mid 80s. The BASIC was OK, and had a Turtle and LOGO if you felt like digging it out of the cupboard.
I remember the lessons were odd, lots of low level theory and assembler. Looking back, I don't think the teachers really understood much. They read us the text, then let us loose on the computers without any real direction. As a result I did most of my learning on a ZX Spectrum at home.
I do remember that the BBC had several sound channels though, and a simple for/next loop through channel 0 produced a cool tune to impress my classmates.
The first computer I saw was a PDP8, donated to the school by the Hydro Electric Commission, the the state electricity generator. What did I learn? That the nerds of the time carried around pockets full of paper tape that did all sorts of useful stuff like a list of the powers of 2. Yes I admit I was a luddite, but several years later I discovered the joys of BASIC programming. What do I do now? Enjoy the fruits of the programming labours of others. I have no interest in programming and am very happy for someone else to take on that poison chalice.
Regarding hardware, well, when I was young, 6-7 grader in the mid-90s, we did have some optional computer lab classes we could take (it wasn't part of the official curriculum), where we had some zx-spectrum clones we learned programming on. Later, when I got into highschool, we had XTs, later 286s and 386s, and so on. I never met Commodores in school, but I had a C64 at home before I started highschool, while my friends got C+4s and VIC20s and one of them had an Amiga (don't remember which one), and a year later I got a 286 which I kept for a few years, and switched to a 386 when I started university in '97. I think this was fairly normal for my environment (central-eastern-europe) back in the days.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I went to highschool in the mid-late 80's in Chicago, Illinois. I was in what was considered to be one of the best public schools in the nation and part of the IB program there, which is just shorthand for saying that the program and resources they gave us were generally top of the line. Yet we had no computers in the school until my 3rd and final year there, and they weren't used for any kind of computer science stuff.
However, many students I knew had a computer - be it an Apple ][ (usually an E), Atari 400/800, C64/128 and we had a pretty robust "warez" trading scene going on at my school.
Really, I don't think I was ever taught anything about computers until fairly late in my career; everything I knew was due to exploration and figuring it out myself or just reading manuals - the closest to being taught something came in the form of seminars or whatever on good practices with my first real employer.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
In the UK, I took O level computer studies and was taught by a former programmer. The time was 1983-85 when I was 14-16 years old.
We covered hardware ("this is a VDU", "Winchester hard disks", etc) and software.
Software was introduced using CESIL (or CECIL?) a low-level language written for instruction by ICL. From this, I transitioned easily to 6809E Assembler (much more complex but I had the fundamentals in place).
We also learned BBC BASIC on BBC Microcomputers which gave us an intro to structured programming rather than GOTO's.
We wrote programs that we ran on the BBCs (if BASIC), or were sent away somewhere else if CESIL. Our teacher taught us to begin with unit testing (or at least, inputs and expected outputs), a flowchart (for which we had to buy a stencil) and then hand-written code on paper. This was before we even thought about sitting at a keyboard and it taught me to *plan*.
I also got to play with an old Research Machines personal computer and a Tandy TRS-80 which I liked because it had an integrated display! At home, I had to battle for the right to use the TV with my family!
Just in case: I'm not a programmer / developer and never have been. Well I do write but I'm more of a data scientist than anything.
bang goes my karma... again...
Ha! I started with a Commodore Pet in about 1980 (I was 9 years old) so BASIC programming and lots of PEEKs and POKEs. By High School it was making high-res pictures on Apple IIs, learning to program LOGO, and making architectural drawings using AutoCAD back when you entered the commands instead of poking around on a graphical menu (I'm nostalgic for that version of AutoCAD to this day).
By university (89-93) it was Fortran 77 and Borland Pascal. Good stuff.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
a ZX 80, Commodore PET and BBC Micros. And some huge Research Machines (RM) thing running DOS that no-one used.
I find it interesting that I know a lot more about computers than those claiming 'kids should be taught Windows in schools as that is what they'll encounter when they enter the workforce'. It's about understanding how computers work, not particular interfaces, peeps! What they're talking about is a slightly glorified typing class, which is NOT teaching about computers.
I was at that age during the 80s (left school in 1990). We had a network of BBC Micros (they had a low cost networking technology called Econet - it worked very well - we had an SJ Research fileserver too during the late 80s).
The school itself didn't teach any computer classes at all. They used the computers in the odd class for educational software. The prevailing view amongst the staff were that "computers were for failed mathematicians so we aren't going to teach any computing based GCSE or A levels". The teacher who ran the computer lab seemed to be the only dissenter from this. He made sure that anyone could access the lab during all the school breaks and for a couple of hours after school, so there were a hard core of us in there whenever we could be there - learing 6502 asm (the BBC had a built in assembler!), writing games, that sort of thing. A friend and I wrote a MUD (multi user dungeon) that ran over Econet. We learned a lot, but we got no formal qualifications from this. Fortunately, this didn't actually matter.
Today the school still doesn't teach any computing courses (I don't class as what passes for "IT" in UK schools as computing - IT classes are actually really just office skills classes, how to use Word and Excel, how to type, that kind of thing). They still teach Latin, though. Sigh.
The teacher who ran the lab back then recently sent me the floppy discs I had used back then (I somehow convinced him back in the day to put a disc of mine in the SJ Research fileserver and leave it there, so I would have an 800K disc on the network for my programs - there were no disc drives on any of the machines in the lab). All my discs are still perfectly readable despite being over 20 years old, although I needed to use a program to copy from MDFS-formatted discs to my ADFS based BBC Master. (Generally, I've found 5.25 inch floppies are very reliable, I have many original discs over 25 years old, and they all work)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I'm 38 and from the Netherlands. In the later classes of primary school (1980 - 1986), computer education was becoming part of the curriculum (although by initiative of the school, it wasn't national or centralised yet). My father worked at IBM and actually helped my school set up a computer class (although not with IBM computers, they were Philips P2000's, a home computer with a built-in high quality keyboard and mini cassette tape deck, as well as pluggable cartridges that contain BASIC, a word processor, educational games, etc.). They used them to teach us the basics of computers, writing simple programs, using a word processor, etc.
In secondary education ("high school", 1986 - 1992) PC's were just being introduced when I was there. They weren't in the classes though, there were just a few of them in the library and you couldn't do much with them. They were networked together but had no connection outside the school and the Internet hardly existed yet. We had some cursory computer education classes teaching us how to use WordPerfect, things like that. No programming or anything like that. Actually the classes I had in primary school were probably more useful for going into computer science...
Next I did two years of university (at Delft), which was very disappointing to me because the first half year we literally did not even touch a computer, despite having taken informatica ("computer science"). It was bone dry and incredibly boring and theoretical and I didn't even manage to gain my propedeuse. Nevertheless this was the place where I encountered the first networked PC's that were actually connected to the Internet. It was also the first time I had a school email address and facilities such as network printing, etc..
I switched to a hogeschool (1994 - 1998; also called university in Anglo-Saxon education systems, but more geared toward a practical education instead of pure research). They had a similar set up of networked PC's (and much more interesting stuff of course, various UNIX boxen, mini computers, etc.) with a school email address, facilities for network printing and managing all kinds of information via computer, and I remember surfing the web with NCSA Mosaic, and Gopher, reading and sending email with Eudora, etc.. There wasn't "computer class" as such, but as I was taking telematica (computer science and telecommunications) the entire education was of course geared towards teaching everything there was to know about computers, from building them to writing operating systems, databases, interactive programs, communication protocols such as TPC/IP, etc.. You were already expected to know the basics, such as using a keyboard and mouse, how to operate a computer in general, etc. It's funny how that may have been a more valid assumption then than it is now.
So all in all I pretty much rode the wave of the introduction of computer education in every level of education I passed through.
I recently had a reunion at my old primary school and was shocked to discover actual full fledged desktop PC's, with keyboard and mouse, in the lowest classes (four and five year olds).
At primary school in the 80s we did Logo (you had to write out anything you'd worked out earlier into your notebook to be able to make advances in next week's half-hour slot, I spent forever making the turtle draw a stick-figure in a top-hat) and some word-programming thing (where the highlight was typing until you nearly reached the end of the line, then carefully and slowly pressing one character at a time so we could all hoot at the word jumping magically to the next line, it was great!).
Then I went to a selective, all-girls high-school, where we were supposed to learn Basic, and Carmen San Diego. Maybe something else too, but I think I spent my time making Basic programs that printed stupid jokes about a particular teacher we didn't like, and getting my friends to run them. Awesome stuff.
Now, 20-something years later, I'm starting to learn Python at Udacity. All of that early exposure must have triggered something in me :p
"You only get ONE LIFE." Richard Rahl, Faith of the Fallen - Terry Goodkind
About the same time - 1966. Computer club in school. We learned Algol, which was transferred to paper tape, and input to the local university's computer (English Electric something or other). Got the compiled results 2 weeks later. Progress was s...l...o...w...
Euro-land checking in! They were trying to teach us some computer basics but the teachers were mostly the PE+geography type and did not have much of a clue at all, so I wasn't really taught much.
But I learned a lot about computers and internet from my friends in school! We hacked (well, script-kiddy-exploited) the school's unix mail server, ran xdcc downloads in the background, had a lot of fun with BO on student AND teacher PCs oh and I really learned to circle-strafe because we would mostly play quake during computer classes!
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
How to correct the maths teachers questions, and then ask for 101% as a test result.
I also taught myself how to program a for loop to print all the lines I had to write, so yeah, time management was also a big one.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Fortran 77 and UCSD Pascal on DEC PDP-11/70.
Ah, the PDP-11/70. I got introduced to BASIC programming on one back in 1978.
Hah, my memories of the 11/70 involved C around 1980-ish. In the late 70s I think I was using a time-sharing PDP-8 with FOCAL (paper tape, teletypes, disturbing memories). Mind you, I was already at grad school after a 4-year university degree in Engineering at that point.
But, returning to topic. My exposure to computers and computer science in high school in the early 1970s was zero, nada, nothing. We had to do calculations with pencil and paper (and eraser). I got a state-of-the-art Sinclair Scientific calculator (only 4 functions, but RPN) on going to university, but was not allowed to use it at exams. The rule was you could use slide rules only in those days.
Excuse me while I wipe some drool off my gray beard.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Well we had a few 286s with monochrome displays and a 386SX with a color display. A physics teacher was trying to teach us logo and dbase but we all ended up playing gorilla.bas and nibbles in qbasic! good days...
My high school "computer" classes were little more than "how to use a spreadsheet" on already-old-at-the-time Apple II computers (late 80's) with a Typing prereq. It was an absolute waste of time. The typing class destroyed my GPA because I'd been using word processing software for nearly a decade at that point and every time I'd glance over to check my work, the teacher would take a full letter grade off.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It was the mid-80s, most of the computer labs were loaded with Apple IIe and TRS (Trash) -80 computers. The school was just starting to explore computing and most of what we had was Oregon Trail and Math Blaster. There was also the occasional "What will you be when you grow up" or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator but that was the meat of it for most students. I was lucky enough to have extremely bad handwriting, so they put me in a special computer class where I learned typing and mouse use on one of the few Macintosh computers the school had at the time. It was enough to get me hooked, but the TI/99 was in storage, and we didn't get a home computer until 1991. It was a Tandy 1000 and was fun to do what was included at first, then I messed it up and watched one of my parents' friends who was an expert recover it. After that, I really started experimenting and learning QBasic, Batch Files, 4DOS, and anything else I could get my hands on.
In High school, all we ever used computers for was typing, graphing, and some CAD in shop class. I did everything else on my own. The coolest thing I got from school was one of my math textbooks had BASIC programs for working through the problems, and I was able to relate it to actual use.
Make America grate again!
i had 'keyboarding', where we learned to actually type on a mechanical typewriter.
Wait, What?
I graduated in 2010, so it was fairly recent. I had 3 Web Design Classes (CSS, JS, HTML, Dreamweaver) and a Networking Class (prepares you for the A+ certification).
Between '93 and '98, my school had a bunch of net-booting Windows 3 machines and a couple of standalones with CD-ROM drives, all in the library. One time after school when the library was open access, I wondered in there to see if I could vulture some computer time and found one of the CD-ROM endowed machines frozen up mid-way through playing a video about monkeys. I rebooted the system, got down to some serious messing around with a new magazine cover disc I'd just got, at which point two teachers walk in. My form tutor and one of the IT supervisor people (normal teacher, no such thing as an IT teacher, he just knew how to do a reboot) walk in and straight over to this computer. My form tutor (female, head of geography) went totally mental at me for rebooting the system before anyone could tell what was wrong with it and I got banned from the library - that's right, not just the computers, the entire library! - for the rest of the year. That was in February.
What I was taught about computers in secondary school was the vasy majority of people haven't got the slighest clue how to use them and have a weird romantic view of any problem being fixable if the right person glances at the screen one time. Beyond any specific technical insight I've every gained, that's been the most valuable thing I've picked up along my career besides buying a iBook G3 8ish years ago - I'm now the star helpdesk support engineer at my company, best customer satisfaction stats for the nth month running (how long have I worked here again? that many months) and *the guy* who gets called in when people are having trouble explaining what's wrong over the phone.
I wanted to take a programming class and had done quite a bit of playing around with Basic at home. I asked one of my math teachers for some advice - should I take Basic for the easy A or would there be some benefit to learning Pascal? What was the difference? She told me Pascal is "just a different language." She sure made it sound like there was no point to taking it. So I didn't. Of course Pascal was a language being used by professionals - Pascal had quite a few significant differences from Basic that were useful to learn - and I wasted a semester because the Basic we learned so easier than what I'd been doing at home.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Labs full of Apple][ computers. They "taught" BASIC and Apple PASCAL. We did so much more on our own including dabbling in 6502 assembly.
I started kindergarten in 1984 and graduated in 1997, and graduated college in 2001.
2nd grade year, we had ONE Apple ][ for the school. We had a little reading program
4th grade - we had a LAB of Apple ][s. We had some story composition programs and some math programs. Lovely green and black screens.
5th grade year - College for Kids - I took five classes - Computer Programming (Basic on a 286 - learned how to program the PC speaker and some graphics and animation in GWBasic), Typing (PC based), Physics, Video Production (Betamax), and Creative writing (my first exposer to Macs - the old lunchbox style ones - and mice and fonts).
Middle school - 7th grade year. IBM PS/2s. 286s. Windows 3.0. Some science programs.
8th grade year - computer lab at middle school got rid of the Commodore 64s and replaced with IBM PS/2s. Teacher barely knew how to use PC. She freaked out when I exited out of Dosshell once to go to Dos, and reported me to the principle saying that I was trying to hack the comptuers. Told the principle that she was an idiot, and obviously didn't know how to use a PC if she thought that "exiting to DOS" was hacking. The computer litteracy class was mostly learning to use Windows, and typing, although we did do a TAD bit of work with spredsheets in Works.
8th grade year also - My Dad had a PC at home. He had a CGA card that had an RCA output on it. He had a paint program and a screen capture program. I used the things to make a presentation that I outputted to VHS to take to class. As far as I know, this was before Powerpoint or that similar program that the Mac had.
8th grade year - buy my first modem, a 2400 baud, and start to get on BBSes. I get on the Internet. NCSA Mosaic is the only webbrowser out there, and you have to use a Dialer, then Trumpet / WinSock to connect to the internet.
9th grade year - high school. The school gets their first network - IBM / Novell Tokenring. 2 servers - Both 486s with 16 MEG of ram. I was one of the only people who had access to the modem bank (we had three modems). Each server would let 100 people on at once, and they had different applications on them, and did not talk to each other. The clients were 286s and 386s with no harddrives and 4 meg ram each. We would sometimes create boot discs to keep off the network to play games. Being no harddrives, Windows ran off of the server. Being tokenring as well, and only 16 meg of ram, pretty much, more than 2 people running Windows at a time brought the network to its knees. We had this system until until after my senior year - I think it was replaced in 1999, as I was actually contracted to help install the new system.
9th grade - I get my first CDRom and SVGA video card for Christmas. The 7th Guest is the hit game. Barely runs on my Dad's 386 / 387. Getting Sierra multimedia games to play is like pulling teeth - after you load your mouse, video and sound drivers, you do not have enough base memory to run the game. Litterally downloading new drivers and trying new versions of DOS trying to force stuff into HIMEM to free up a few K here and there to get games to run. DOS4GW was such a blessign when games started going to that!
10th grade year - Rummors that Comodore is coming back with a computer called The BeBox. I get my first 14.4k baud modem at a computer flea market. Me and my friends setup a BBS. We start with Tag, but after complaints about how hard it is, our parents buy us Wildcat. My friend Laura is the Sysop and provides the PC and the phone line, my friend Clay is in charge of ANSI graphics and Door Games, I am in charge of the file area and RIP graphics. We install a hidden DOS door so that we can do maintanance simply by dialing in.
11th grade - I start working, and, to my parents surprise, instead of buying a car, I buy a PC. $1800, Pentium 90, 16 meg ram, Sound Blaster Awe32, 1.2 gig harddrive, Windows 95, 28.8 modem. I was one of the first 5,000 people on MSN, which was so cool because I could download more than 1 thing at a time. It was so cool!
In the UK, sweet FA! And this was only several years ago. The most they were willing to teach in a government school was that a computer runs Windows XP. On Windows XP you can use Word, Access, PowerPoint and Internet Explorer. Thank Christ I did my own research and avoided being trained to be a secretary.
-- David
C++, Python, Javascript, PHP, Java - in that order. Age 23-27 - soon to graduate. Yes.. late I know.. lots of fun though. :)
My elementary school was pretty cutting edge - we had computers at all. They backed the wrong horse, however, as what we had to start with were TI 99-4/a computers. The idea was sound, but there weren't enough for an entire classroom, so it was a case of privileged students being given computer time as a reward for good work and/or behavior, which was then mostly spent on games. I think that they might have changed to something else by the time I left, but I don't remember whether it was Commodore, Atari or Apple, since I had unlimited access to similar machines at home. We had to take a keyboarding/word processing course in junior high; first, we learned to type on electric typewriters, and then learned word processing in MS Works. In high school, I had a programming class that was in qBasic on 286 machines. There was a theoretical follow on class that didn't have enough interest to happen that would have, I believe, been a Pascal class.
in elementary school we did some logo. once in high school we got pascal. i had no problem whatsoever following cause i already knew pascal, self-taught. the rest of the class were sitting there eyes wide open not understanding a thing.. cause the teacher had assumed everyone knew what a computer was and how it worked.... at that time i was the only one who actually had a computer at home :p
My high school set up a computer lab between my senior and junior year. The computers were C64s, and the only class taught was called "Computer Math". We learned about binary, octal, and hexadecimal, a little about binary coded decimal, what ASCII was, what an algorithm was, and did some programming in BASIC, mostly oriented around math. If I remember right, the most advanced thing we did was an implementation of Newton's Method for finding solutions to equations.
It was considered an advanced class, and there were no computer classes for "average" kids at the school at that time. We probably could have learned a lot more, but the teacher didn't really seem to know much about the subject. C64 assembly would have been an interesting thing to delve into, and would have given us an actual use for the stuff about binary and hex, at least - instead, we got to do programs in BASIC to convert between them. Bleh.
Things were actually a bit better in junior high. There, we had a course called "The Wheel" which was six six-week sessions on different topics. One of those was computers, and we learned a bit about hardware, history of computers, and that sort of thing, and got to do some BASIC programming on Commodore PETs. The teacher there was one of those ex-military types who ran his class like it was some kind of Basic Training, though, with pushups for talking back and all that kind of thing.
So the actual class wasn't so great, but the kids in Gifted were allowed to come to the computer lab after school and hang out and play around with the computers. I got to play my first actual computer game (Miser's Mansion), and, since it was in BASIC, was able to list it out and try to figure out how it worked. We were also mostly unsupervised there, with just a teacher who went in and out and made sure we weren't destroying the computers or doing anything to each other we shouldn't... so I was able to do "playing around" programming. Unfortunately, I had no access to any storage medium, so I had to type in the programs fresh each time, and never did anything terribly long because of that.
Anyway, my formalized education in IT at school was all on BBC Micros during the mid to late 80's; a beneficiary of the BBC Computer Literacy Project. It was on these that I encountered my first network with the Beeb's Econet... we had a BBC Master that acted as our "server" in the computer lab... it all worked pretty well. I did learn some stuff on these machines, and I still have a serious soft spot for the old Beeb; it was a great computer for the time. Not much of a games machine, but a great computer in general and dead easy to work with.
Now, my REAL education in computers, systems and programming was outside of school. I was part of the "Demoscene" on both the Amiga and Atari ST during this time, too. I was a member of a couple of groups at a time, back when we didn't have email to trade our code back and forth. We shared code by floppy disks in the mail... did that all the time and was an active member of groups in Sweden (which was sort of Demoscene Mecca) and one in London. I learned a lot more about computers doing this than I did at school, and by the time I was in my last couple of years of school computer labs I was bored out of my skull because the stuff I was doing at school was so far behind what I was doing in my spare time at home that I just couldn't muster the interest. I mean seriously; we were coding stuff in Pascal to display a menu, store data and stuff... meanwhile I was busy pushing the limits of the computers I had at home and doing stuff that the manufacturers said couldn't be done. Ahhh... good times :)
I have a 12 year old son in school in the USA today and am constantly appalled at the level of computer teaching in middle school. I am pretty close to putting him in private school because public school here just sucks.
TRS-80 Model III. A roomful of them networked together such that they could all simultaneously load a program off the one cassette tape drive. Now that I think about it, that "network" was probably just a multi-way splitter on the audio output to pipe it to all the computers' input jacks.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
The correct question is what did you teach in high school. We got a pet close to my graduation and i had to teach the librarian how to use it. Later she became the instructor for 'computer classes'...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Our school had 3 computers, IBM PCs. In order to get into computer class, you had to take a year of typing and show that you could type at least 65 wpm. This was supposedly to weed out the kids that weren't serious about working on computers. Once in computer class, we spent the entire year playing Wheel of Fortune, Where in the World is Camen Sandiego and Oregon Trail. I learned more about computers from a programming book I had at home for my Apple ][e than I ever did in computer class.
Graduated from high school in 1966.
Computers?
We had manual typewriters in typing class.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
In 4th or 5th grade (~1992) we as a class learned Logo (the turtle!). As a high school freshman I was in a typing class to learn the classical/proper techniques of typing. As a high school senior (1999) we had a "Computer Science" elective which was essentially a class for learning HTML and simple JavaScript, with some very broad strokes about networks, client/server, and how a web page shows up on your computer. That was one of the best classes I took and the reason I'm doing development today. We also had a couple of one-time sessions about how to use the computers to do research and find journals or books in the library. Nothing else was taught before college as I recall, including (surprisingly in retrospect) how to use word processing and spreadsheets.
Computers were big, cost millions, and lived in climate controlled glass rooms
Sometimes, on field trips to local defense contractors, we were allowed to walk by the glass and look inside
Had and took the opportunity to learn data processing my jr year in h.s. at a vocational ed. center, working with 10" floppy disks and punch cards on a Burroughs minicomp. Sr. year took a class in COBOL programming on the same mini which ultimately led to my being able to get a full ride to DeVry. All of this was against my h.s. counsellors wishes who insisted that I would be better off staying at the h.s. taking college prep classes. Went to DeVry, graduated in '86, and have been working in the industry ever since. This was kind of the advent of h.s. agers getting a chance to really touch computers in any meaningful way I think and it has worked out for me overall. Todays kids are so inundated with technology that it's nothing special to them but back then, it was something way out of the ordinary I think.
In the late 80's, I had an AP Computer Science class in high school.
I'd been programming on a Commodore PET and later an Atari 800 in BASIC and assembly language since 5th grade, so I thought there wasn't anything else for me to learn about CS :)
But my HS teacher actually taught us structured programming, data structures, recursion, etc. in Pascal on Apple IIs. So I actually did learn a lot!
The teacher previously taught shop and electronics, and I was kind of surprised he was able to present such a quality CS course.
As a Brit, I am not 100% certain what American terms such as "high school" or "grade school" means, but I'm guessing secondary school - age range approximately 16-18.
My school introduced an 'O'-level course in that time period - I think my class might have been the 2nd or 3rd year to do it. The odd thing was that 'O' levels are the 14-16yr exams, so we were doing a more junior course while doing senior exams.
The computer department had 4 already quite elderly Commodore PET machines - I believe model 4032 ones, networked (kinda sorta) over IEEE to a CMD 4040 dual 5¼" disk drive. They later acquired a whole room full of TI99/4As, each with its own cassette recorder and 14" black & white TV set. The PETs were a much more pleasant environment than the TIs - they only got the TIs because they were very cheap. BBC Micros were the standard by then.
I did my coursework on my home computer, a 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as it was more capable than the school computers. Coursework was presented on paper, not in machine-readable form, so it didn't hugely matter on what you wrote your BASIC.
The first lesson, the computer teacher - who was one of the maths teachers - told us all just how useless a Computer Studies 'O'-level would be and that we should all focus on our 'A'-levels, the exams that would secure us a place at University. About half the class walked out.
The rest were told that this was a waste of their time, that they should not do it, that it would not impart any useful skills and was only simple, "Mickey-Mouse" stuff. More walk-outs.
In the end, there were about half a dozen of us, determinedly hanging on. He proceeded to tell us not to do the course, that it was futile and pointless and a distraction that would reduce our chances of getting into Uni.
The rest walked. I stayed.
I made a deal with him. He told me the syllabus; I did it myself, in my own time, and checked in with him once a fortnight to ensure I was on the right track. He wasn't happy and advised against it, but I pressed on.
The following year, half way through my non-course, a full class series was taught, and I sat in on some of those, learning moderately arcane stuff like one's-complement and two's-complement binary arithmetic.
So I ended up tutoring myself in my spare time. I got a 'B' in the end.
The course was quite low-level - binary, octal, hex and conversions; simple programming in BASIC - the 8-bit BASICs of the time mostly did not have things like IF...THEN...ELSE or WHILE...WEND or CASE statements, let alone named procedures or support for local variables and recursion, so it was all quite rudimentary.
I took a step back in time 2y later, studying FORTRAN at Uni as part of a Biology BSc. Got a First in that, but never used the language - the little bit of stats and so on, I did on my Spectrum.
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
I don't suppose you ever got to play with the LEO II they had there, did you?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
When I was in high school computers worked for astronomers and were even paid wages.
I went to high school in the 90's. We had a bunch of mostly functional PCs from a local manufacturer. By 10th grade I was on paid IT staff, with four or five of my geeky friends. We were paid to do NT4 admin, cabling projects and to support the staff and students. I came in to summer school one year and several of my friends saw me and figured I was there to get my grades back up like they were. I walked into the class with them and sat down. The teacher then introduced me as someone they could ask for help on their computers. They got weird looks on their faces and I went back to IRC.
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
When we were told about computers, in the 60s, they were still bigger than a mack truck.. and their version of "mini" computer would boggle the mind. and that programming was a thankless task.. using tape reels and punchcards.. the quote I remember the clearest from the teacher was you'll likely never work on a computer in your lifetimes, but in a few hundred years they'll probably be as small as your Television set ;-) HYUK!!
My high school got an IBM 1130 for the fall of 1971 and offered 2 courses: 1) Computer and 2) Advanced Computer. We had 3 card punch machines in the same room. In the first class we learned FORTRAN 4 and APL.
Was your high school Baltimore Polytechnic Institute? It sounds like the exact same setup and time-frame that I had. I went to BPI in 1971-1973 before moving to Alexandria Minnesota where I graduated in 1975. At this stage, I unfortunately don't remember much about it, nor anybody in the classes, but we may have been classmates.
Not even one to rule them all just one computer on the entire campus. Actually there was only the one computer that ran the schedules for that college, all of the high schools in that part of the state and at least three different colleges.
Fortran students submitted their cards to be run and it usually took a week or so for an entire class to be run.
Calculators were rare and expensive, they cost about $350 for a TI.
In 1977 my wife took the Fortran programing class in Grad school.
Her cards were run once, there was no more time to run them again.
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
did you mean to ask: "what did you teach the teachers about computers?". /CF
I graduated in the late 1980s and I had to work to get my hands on computers. About all I got significant hands-on time with were Apple IIs. I quickly learned more than the teacher and got sent to the principal's office for correcting her one too many times. I was also apparently an early software pirate, I copied some sort of system disk and got in trouble for that. I don't even remember why, I didn't have an Apple at home.
There was a room full of PCs in the school but I somehow never figured out how to get my hands on those. I think they were teaching typing or something on them.
The main computer room had an early Mac that the yearbook geeks would crowd around, I wasn't a bit interested in it. No command line.
I would also play Spy Hunter with the 2 game controllers plugged in. One on the floor so I could change weapon selection with my feet and the other in my hands for controlling the car and firing. Like I said, sad.
Don't feel bad... I played the same way on my C64. I bet lots of kids did that back then.
btw... I'm also from Central NJ and I learned Apple BASIC and Pascal in school, as well. (Graduated HS in '88) No COBOL for me, though. By the time I had computer classes in school, I had a Vic-20 at home, so I walked in basically knowing BASIC already. Helped having a grandmother that treated me to a computer when I was around 11. heh She also got me my C64. Thank you, Nana! I miss you!
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
As the title suggests, what they taught us in school was next to useless. The primary focus was on Microsoft Office and typing. The only thing i took away from MS office was a love for excel sheets. I learned to type more from IM clients than the typing class. Now i learned a lot about computers in high school, but most of it was self taught. Wireless networking? Learned that during LAN parties. Computer hardware? Learned that upgrading my computer, for LAN parties.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
Circa 1979-80... first computer was a DEC PDP-8, we did most of our programming in BASIC with mark-sense cards. A little later I graduated to an account at the University on their DEC-10 (TOPS-10), BASIC and FORTRAN with punch cards and occasionally a terminal if you could find one.
Cool! I was working on Plato around '83 - '85 at the University of Arizona (zaft/uaphys).
Three computer labs. 30 TRS80's, 30 IBM PC's, and 30 Apple II's. I learned programming on the TRS80's and IBM's (DOS and CP/M). Basic & C. Cut my teeth the first time researching what sorting algorithm/language/machine was fastest. Brings back memories from 29 years ago. Just fun...
Computers were pretty new there, school got PETs, my brother and I did pretty well with them after we aced the BASIC programming classes (which just went through a BASIC introduction book) we were given independent study assignments and also did some programming for the school (my brother absence list/overdue list, and I wrote some additional graphics routines for a BASIC CAD program for the mechanical drawing class). I also got to borrow a donated TRS-80 for a few months to play with - fun times.
Picture of the circa 1982 Calaveras High Computer Club - brother and I in the back with the Disk Drive (i'm facing the computer, brother is the guy with the wild hair), the rest were running with cassettes.
We also went to a regional programming competition a couple years - these rules were from our first year (1982) - which our team got fifth place - next year we got third place.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
They showed us pictures of an IBM computer that filled an entire room. For one CPU!
The next year, they took us to the business classroom and showed us an electric calculator that actually did multiply and divide to 15 digits. Electrical as in electric motor to turn the drive shaft! Cachunk,cachunk!
But it was another five years before electronic calculators got to 15 digits, and some still don't have that many.
Some students had a mechanical calculator that worked with a stylus, sliding small metal rails right and left to count. But it was only for add and subtract.
One day the science teacher brought in a big box and set something up on the big table in the library. It was one of the Mits Altair computers. 256 Bytes of memory, one CPU, and a clock speed that you could actually see flickering the lights. LOTS of lights and toggle switches, but no terminal at all.
After high school, the "Tech Center" that I went to had an actual computer, and I got to play with punch cards! ... Once a week.
We started out with PETs in like 1984 because of a progressive teacher. He insisted that computers would soon become very important. The school wouldn't pay for the machine so he bought one and started a computer club where we learned basic architecture and simple programming. I became hooked and tried to get my hands on a Tandy to learn about how the darn thing worked. My parents finally gave in an bought me a C64 to program on and I got my hands on a Vic20 to tear apart and learn how it worked.
Our middle school got one of the early Macs which was used for little more than games. I stuck with learning assembler and machine language on the C64.
By the time I got to HS there was a simple lab of C64 machines. We learned some basic programming and how to control the video and memory in the machines. Very little science and tons of trial and error. After a year of that I found our chemistry teacher had a PCJr. He let us turn into a dual head machine so two of us could work on it at the same time by overlaying the OS with a round-robin OS that allowed dual input and output. We taught ourselves Pascal and memory management. In my spare time I learned the concepts around DBMS and began to create simple database tools to implement inventory systems for the school. Also started working on drawing and architectural programs to use in our drafting classes. Our school wasn't very progressive and only a couple of us were interested enough to teach ourselves how the machines worked. In the end though it sure helped to prep me for college and the real world.
FOCAL-69 on two DEC PDP-8/L's with ASR-33 teletypes with paper tape reader/punch.
We had a KENBAK-1 "trainer" that I learned the basics of logic and machine language on.
There was no formal class; there was an interested math teacher who taught the basics after school to some kids,
who then taught the rest (including me).
The PDP-8's were eventually replaced, first with a rented Wang minicomputer (cassette tape drive and video terminal),
then a Polymorphic 88 micro (floppy drives). BASIC on both.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
We learned that if you take them with you to Jupiter to investigate a magnetic anomaly, they WILL kill you. And, that the "chads" from punch cards make great confetti.
I'm turning 30 this year and graduated high school in Southern California in 2000.
I remember two distinctive attempts at computer education in my public education. First was in 4th and 5th grades when, at a new elementary school, the dedicated computer teacher who taught only computer classes brought us into the lab to teach us about the internals of a computer tower just as a biology teacher would teach us about the squishy bits inside of a frog. I remember the hardest thing to understand is that these new 3.5" floppy disks were not "floppy" like the 5.25" floppy disks, but should never be referred to as "hard disks". Those were completely different. Eventually, he would teach us the internals with moderate success.
Next, he taught us "Logo" or, as many of us called it, "turtle drawing". I had very limited success here and invested only as much effort as required so I could be allowed to play the Oregon Trail or "Freedom!" which was a game that put the player in the persona of a runaway slave in the antebellum South.
In high school, I elected to take a "computer" class, that was actually just a typing class. My hands were already too big for the iMac keyboards, so I learned to type without using my pinkies for anything but shift, alt, and ctrl keys. This was "wrong", however, and I would have to repeat my exercises if I was caught not using home row properly. Instead, I made it a goal to complete as many exercises as possible and then, when the teacher came around, to switch to the painful home row standard. I completed the "course" with a couple weeks to spare, so I found locked games that were installed on the iMacs, switched to a computer behind the teacher, and played those for the rest of the term.
The only other school-related computer education I had was the use of the "Computer Science" lab (PCs) after hours with actual computer science students playing Starcraft and Counter-Strike. I learned more with those guys playing those games than at any other time before graduating high school
Well, I was supposed to have typing classes in both the high schools I went to, but I managed to skirt around that requirement. In 10th grade (in 1999), I took elective classes in QBasic and Visual Basic programming the first semester, and then C++ programming in the second. Beyond that, I helped found a computer club....although, that quickly degenerated into a "play Starcraft after school" club, which was much more popular. When I was there, they had mostly phased out their ancient 386 machines and moved to some 166MHz Pentium II's. By 2000, I was in a different school, which had a number of computers open for student use, but no programming or computer science courses.
The first school was a DoDEA school in Germany. The second was a public high school in a fairly well off neighborhood in southern California.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I was taught that you can use basic to program the Apple IIe to do a lot of things on its monochrome monitor. Also, I have a 4-digit /. UID.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Born in 1975. My small rural elementary school didn't have any computers at all, but when I moved to a small town at the beginning of 4th grade the new school had a computer lab full of Apple ]['s. We didn't use them much, but got a little training in Logo every year, and maybe a couple of other introductions. I remember really loving Logo and wishing I had more of it, while mostly being frustrated that I couldn't type fast enough.
I liked the computers enough I started staying in at recess to play Carmen Sandiego, at least as often as the teacher would let me. I guess maybe we used the labs on some bad-weather recesses, too. Probably how I learned to play the games in the first place.
Junior high had some computers but again exposure was limited. My social studies class led us through playing a game based on competition and cooperation between two superpowers over finding and using two different types of oil - can't remember the name, but I liked it enough I finagled a way to stay after school and play it a few times. We also did a few things in math class, including a couple of games, though a lot of that was in a club after school - both extracurricular and voluntary. My other exposure was in Journalism in the 8th grade, where we had a lone Macintosh that we used to assemble the school newspaper. The advisor did most of it, but I picked up a few things.
By high school (1989-1993) computers were around more, but still not real prevalent. There was never any mandatory official training. I did take an optional typing class, which I sometimes say was the most useful thing I got out of high school. Even after the class I was still typing a pretty lousy 25-30 WPM, but I had picked up enough skills so when I really started typing regularly in college (email, online chat) I finally got it down. This class had older computers that had the wide and actually floppy discs, rather than the hard-case floppies in prevalence at the time. I know we did use computer labs here and there, but with one exception I can't remember any of the exercises or uses.
The one exception was again the journalism room, which had a set of six Macintosh computers (early model, booted from external hard drives, black and white 9-inch screens) and one networked printer. Again we used it for newspaper and yearbook paste-up, writing the docs in Microsoft Word and then importing into PageMaker for layout. In down time I also spent quite a bit of free time on those computers, mostly playing games but also exploring system settings, and somehow became the de-facto tech support. I also loved the art program (Paint? I feel like that's not the right name), doing a lot of art for fun and becoming the local info-graphics expert. Nearly all of this was voluntary and for fun, but convinced me I was a computer guy.
By college computers were everywhere, but again I can't recall any official formal or basic training. It was mostly expected we already knew a little, or we'd pick up what we needed from friends. We had fairly early access to email in 1993 - less than 10% of my high-school classmates got it at their schools by default, though by graduation in 1997 I think more than half were online. The college had a VAX system for email with computers scattered freely in every dorm and class building. I picked a science major and was given access to a UNIX system there. My intro C++ class was actually taught on Macs, but Programming 102 was on a UNIX system. Dunno why they did it that way. Papers were expected to be typed, and we had a mix of Mac and Windows labs, though I think we were much heavier on the Mac side. Even as late as 1997 we didn't use PowerPoint for presentations, but instead mocked up the designs in whatever program we had (Word?) and printed them onto overhead slides. Most training was one-off assignments for class, including a fractal calculation done for calculus using Excel, a few Physics experiments here and there, and some FORTRAN taught along with an optional Physics and Computing course. Of course
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
About 1967, T. Vincent Learson, an IBM executive and Boston Latin School Alumnus, donated (the rental of) an IBM 1130 minicomputer system to the school for academic purposes only. It may have been the first on-premises computer at a high school dedicated to student computing. All 10th graders learned FORTRAN IV using McCracken's textbook. The machine had 4k 16 byte words. We punched cards on 029 keypunches. Printouts came out on the console, based on a 12 CPS Selectric typewriter. The 1 platter 14 inch disk held about 160K, if I recall. Students were not permitted to store anything on it.
I wrote programs to do my homework for me. I hated hand drawing graphs, so I wrote a program to graph equations (rather than merely functions). I used it to graph functions (0=y-f(x)), equations, numerical differentiation and integration.
Guy Steele did some amazing things with it in Assembler, aside from what has been publicized about his implementing LISP on it. He wrote a card deck listing program that interleaved printing with reading the columns on the cards. He also wrote a one card binary program that would read the text punched on the next card and then punch that text as a dot matrix of holes on the cards that followed. It was brilliant, but the cards with too many holes near each other often broke and jammed the machine.
Many of us received free admission tickets to the Spring Joint Computer Conference in Boston in 1969.
After I graduated in 1970, the machine was upgraded to 16K words and a line printer. Steele's LISP may have been implemented on that.
I took APCS A in 11th grade as part of a class; I completed APCS AB through independent study under the same instructor in 12th grade. That was the extent of my formal computer education in high school.
In middle school, I completed our district-wise computer requirement, which focused entirely on typing skill. I had a computing elective for about eight weeks in 6th grade and a similar course in 7th grade. Beyond improving my typing, I didn't learn anything useful--and what improved my typing even more was email, chatting, and IM, all things I did at home and not on some ancient Apple IIe at school.
One of my elementary school teachers used computer time as a reward, but we didn't have any sort of ongoing computer class.
The vast majority of what I learned in middle and high school was learned at home, not in the classroom. Not that we didn't have fun playing Counter-Strike in the APCS lab at lunchtime, but I wouldn't call it a spectacular computing education. Our curriculum was considered stronger than most other schools in our county at the time.
This is Slashdot. None of us went to high schools where the teachers could teach us anything about computers.
or else!
I was using mainly PETs (we probably had about 7 or 8 of them), though I did my 'O' Level project on the BBCs (we had about 5 or 6). We also had a Research Machines 380Z, though I don't remember ever using it or seeing it running anything.
This was from about '82 - '87.
The computer teacher also brought his Vic-20, then C64 into school, and we'd play on those outside of lessons.
We learnt to program in BASIC, the history of computing, flowcharts, etc.
Great times.
It really depends on the school. I was at 3 different schools with different results:
1. A private school where we had keyboards with cartridges hooked up to TVs even in Kindergarten, and we were learning how to type in the computer lab in 4th grade on Apple computers, as well as learning Logo. Networking wasn't a big thing yet, so no network.
2. A private school where we didn't have a computer lab for the first several years I was there; and when we did we had old i386 machines with 4 or 8 MB of RAM; and learned how to type (9th grade) and minimally use WordPerfect 5.2 (well after WordPerfect had moved to Win95). The network was in place, but it was just a decrepit.
3. A public high school where we had 3 PC computer labs with 25 computers each, 3 or so Mac labs with 25-30 computers each, and a number of Apple computers spread throughout the building; each teacher had at least one in their classroom for their own use. We had 4 programming classes - intro, and 3 language dedicated courses, etc. There were also a number of other classes that utilized the computer lab - e.g. nearly all the business classes.
The first was in a very different geographic location from 2 & 3 which were in the same geographic location.
So it really depends on where you are, and what schools have. #2 has probably gotten better since, but not likely by much. Where as #1 is probably on par or with or better than #3.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I'm hearing this a lot from a lot of the people about my age (early 30's) who graduated high school in the mid-90s. In elementary school in the 80's there was a lot more interest in teaching programming (BASIC, LOGO, HyperCard, etc.), but then as the 90's went on "computer classes" became dumbed down to the point where they were just teaching typing and office software, and programming was an elective if it was even offered at all. This was my experience in school. Why do you think this was? Was it because schools wanted to churn out secretaries, because Microsoft and Apple stopped bundling free programming software (GW-BASIC, HyperCard, etc.) with their operating systems, because the computer market was heading more towards "information appliances" than "general-purpose computers", or because there just weren't enough teachers or enough demand for programming classes?
La Jolla, pre "Pannikin"? :-)
I haven't seen the place, myself, in 30 years.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Well I went high school in the 70's. Two things I learned about computers in HS. 1. Jack and 2. Shit. They had a class and it was considered a science class on computers and it was taught on the timeshare Westinghouse system that the school leased timeshares on. I guess Westinghouse or at least that division was out of New Hampshire and the school did all their computer processing business on that timeshare, report cards and the like. I never took the class because you had to be recommended for it and no science teacher was lining up to recommend this pothead for that class. I learned how to use PC's in the Air Force. I had a Zenith PC / XT equivalent dropped on my desk along with the manuals on Dos, 123, and Peach Bundle. I read all the manuals and learned how to use the thing. Great deal. I got out of the service and the State of CT paid for my college education were I learned to program.
Paul E. Bahre
Nope, didn't know they had one...I don't remember the exact year I was over there but probably 1965 -1966. We were kids from Oundle, so probably the ICL 1900 was the easiest thing for us to use. Thanks, must get to museum at Bletchley sometime soon, heard a realy enthusiastic and inspiring talk from one of the staff, very recently...
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Ha ha, well, we ultimately did fix it, and not just by simply increasing ulimit -s . But it was not exactly a great intro to elegant programming technique using recursion :P
Attempts to mechanise (note 'mechanise') calculations are somewhat sparce in usefullness, contarcts Difference engines, Countess Ida and the mechanised weaving looms (Jaquard) you lot (us students) might do better when you get going.
We did.
Regards Eion MacDonald
Nothing of note. I did a GCSE in IT and it was rubbish, basically Facebook ethics and how to use Word. I did not chose IT at A level even though I want to do CS at uni. This is because it is more Facebook ethics. I remember one question on my GCSE paper was a table listing three phones and the question asked me which one had the most memory (not even specific as to whether it was RAM or Flash storage although i could infer it), what a stupid question. it was basically, which is bigger 100 or 200, also aparently examiners do not understand that usually flash memory chips come in base two divisions
I had a computer science class in high school in 1994 & 1995. We had Apple ][e as I recall, and the coding was done in Basic. Your usual stuff, learning about conditional branching and so forth. Also had typing class.
In 1995 or 1996 I got a dial-up account with Fox Valley Internet for my 486DX which I believe was running OS/2 Warp. Couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do with UUCP, Gopher and Usenet (besides the obvious photo-downloading) so I didn't keep it for more than a few months and went back to chatting on the Lunatic Phringe.
I kept trying to give people my email address...I suppose that'd be like giving someone your pager number now. Most people would call up, hear the beeps, get confused and hang up.
Unlike all you ancient geeks I graduated highschool in 2004. During that time I was taught xhtml1.0/css 1st thing. No one ever even mentioned tables or inline styles. I only learned about those professionally through designing for email marketing.
The first year that the course was run, it was severely oversubscribed. So, some people who had asked to go on the course were put off it. The headmaster said to us, "You're the people who are likely to be the first pupils from this school to ever go to a university anywhere. The people we've left on the course are likely to never have another chance to study computing. When you get to university, you may get a chance to study computing. So, for the sake of your year-mates, will you just put back learning about computers for four years or so. It's not as if anything important is going to change in that period of time."
No, seriously ; that is (the gist of) what he said. He was probably a Classics man.
Hardware : consisted of a stack of Hollerith encoding forms and a Teletype with a tape reader. Interactivity was that one week you write your program on the form, and the next week the results of your program would come back from the university as a box of tapes, which we then fed into the Teletype to get the results. Which were typically error messages from the mainframe.
Of course, it wasn't long (about 3 weeks) before some of the brighter thickos realised that they could punch their own tapes and cheat their homework by producing tapes of their own which appeared to show a correct run of their program. Unless they slipped with the hole punch and made a spelling mistake in the "output". And unused rolls of paper tape became a valuable commodity.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
My high school had a room full of TRS-80 Model III and a few Model IV. They used them to teach BASIC programming, two different one-semester classes. I was a pretty good TRS-80 BASIC programmer already so I didn't intend to take them.
I remember them being networked somehow, with four floppy drives and a printer attached to the Model III that was the "server." The other Model III computers had no drives. Printer contention was handled by announcing that you were going to print, then nobody else would print until you were done.
Then my senior year they got a lab full of Apple II and were doing Pascal on them. But I couldn't get in the Pascal class because I didn't have the BASIC prereq. They at least let me skip the first BASIC class and take the second one, as a sort of consolation prize.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
We did programming for our 7th Form Applied Maths class at the Christchurch Polytech. It was across the road from my school and we used two PDP 11 computers running RT-11. We learnt to program numerical methods using BASIC. The computers were prone to overheating and "crashing" in summer, so I had to "bootstrap" them a few times using their front panel switches and some instructions taped above them. I spent many hours using them on my private projects, oblivious to the fact that the school was being charged for my usage, I was the the top user in my class that year, costing them $200, oops!
I was very, very lucky. I got to learn Algol 60 when I was 14 in 1971. The school later organised for me to have a PL/I programming job between school and University. Thanks Burnley Grammar School!
I was born in 1976 so I got to experience the rise and fall of inexpensive mainstream 8-bit and 16/32-bit microcomputers during my school years. Perhaps more significantly, I also got to experience “home computing” as a hobby, rather than as daily necessity. Also, I belong to one of the generations which were – already before entering school – significantly more knowledgeable about computers than their parents. I suspect this is a condition which may no longer necessarily hold true with the more recent generations...
I entered the first grade of elementary school in September 1983. I also got my first computer, the Commodore 64, for the Christmas of that same year. It was not my first experience of personal computers, however: during the previous year, I had already got my feet wet on my friend’s VIC-20. (My friend was an enthusiastic home computer hobbyist and he had taught me some BASIC programming, so I knew a little bit about that, too – even before entering the school.)
As far as my school was concerned, computers didn’t really exist. They where nowhere to be seen in the lower grades (1–6). They just didn’t belong to the curriculum for the smaller kids. Most adults – including school teachers – were only trying to come to terms with the rather frightening prospect they will yet need to learn about these devil’s machines before retiring... The kids of my generation, though, were eager to get a home computer for themselves during those years, which was in no small part because they filled roughly the same spot as game consoles today. But home computers were also favored by hobbyists and tinkerers, of course, and I had the hobbyist/tinkerer mindset about it. Games were only of secondary interest.
After a few years, my C64 setup had grown to include the Commodore 1541 diskette drive (I started out with the Datasette), the MPS-801 dot matrix printer, and a copy of the GEOS graphical desktop environment – even a Commodore 1351 mouse, which was a rather rarely seen peripheral for the C64. Beginning from the 3rd grade, I was actually using geoWrite (the standard word processor which came with GEOS) for some of my school work. The teachers were a bit baffled at receiving dot-matrix printouts on fan-fold paper from a 3rd grader but generally their response was pretty good. On occasion, though, I was not allowed to use the computer because the teacher insisted typing would not serve the secondary purpose of the writing assignments: honing ones skills in cursive handwriting. This was somewhat irritating considering I was rather more inclined to write in block letters, anyway (and continue to do so to this date...)
Our class was assigned a class magazine project both during the 5th and the 6th grade. I brought my entire Commodore 64 setup in school to make it possible to design the layout of the pages (partially) on a computer. My Finnish teacher – who has now sadly passed away – was so excited about getting this primitive form of computer-based desktop publishing in her class she called the local paper and they made a story about it, with a picture and all. The second year I did this I also brought in an Osborne I and another dot matrix printer which my dad had salvaged from getting binned at his workplace. I let another kid type in articles using WordStar on this other computer.
By the time I entered the 7th grade (1989), I found out the upper level elementary school had two computer labs for teaching “automatic data processing”. These were the only classrooms with computers in them in the whole of school. (Later on, the music class and the art class received a computer each as well.) The older one of the two computer labs was already considered obsolete as it was only equipped with Apple IIs. The current focus of the computer classes was on MS-DOS and IBM-compatible PCs. The typing class, however, used the Apples for typing exercises. Otherwise they just sat there unused. (The problem was, ho
Notes from my 1979 middle school programming class.
I learned that if you have a team of people (students and teachers) all working together to produce a program, then it's possible you may actually create something so large that you're machine might actually require an expansion to 64K of RAM, rather than the default 16K.
I also learned that saving your program to a floppy is way more convenient than saving it on a regular cassette tape.
Of course, back in 1982 or so, our entire high school only had one Apple II.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Well, I'm a Junior, and I only got a mandatory course that did nothing higher than HTML. Although next year, I'll be in AP Computer Science.
But as a Sophomore at a small college, I find that my high school was more up-to-date on technology than my college is. For example, my college uses Novell and Firefox 3.5 instead of newer versions of Firefox. This bothers me to no end, so whenever possible, I try to avoid using school computers. When I'm forced to, I prefer to use a portable copy of Google Chrome on my flash drive so that I don't run into compatibility issues.
Our school had 4 Apple ][ computers and one Apple ][c - and our very limited "Computer Math" class required passing a test to get in. I was in the "Computer Math" class in it's first semester at the school. My final project was (of course) an AD&D character generator written in Apple Basic (the only option we had) which allowed a large amount of flexibility in how random the generated character actually was. You could specify a race and a class and it would take the randomly generated amounts for each stat and adjust them as needed to make the character "legal" according to AD&D rules (by moving points from one stat to another as needed). If you wanted a fully random result it would generate everything randomly, including randomly selecting race and class from all that were valid with the given stats.
After generating the character it was printed out in a format that lined up almost exactly with the "official" AD&D character sheets. When we turned in our project we were required to turn in the floppy disk and a prinout of the code. Mine took a stack of around 3" of fan-fold printer paper. Not sure how many pages that was, but it was a lot. About 1/4 of that code was dedicated to pinting with the proper formatting.
So, what did I learn overall? I learned that programming was pretty damn cool, and that things which are really simple to do are often quite difficult to program correctly.
Death looks every man in the face. All any man can do is look back and smile. - Marcus Aurelius
Taught myself BASIC to build simple roleplaying games (all written out by hand, some worked) then moved on to LOGO in 5th grade. Got yelled at for teaching everyone the DRIVE command (using arrow keys to move the turtle around). Got bored with LOGO and switched back to BASIC to write slightly more complicated roleplaying games in sixth grade. (Same as before, hand coded...more of those worked.)
Didn't mess with computers for couple of years till my dad got an Amiga. Learned enough on that to keep up with him. Switched to Macs when he married my stepmother (she worked for Adobe.) Learned enough on those to do what I needed to do (lots of writing and checking out the early Internet).
Other interests intervened till I was in my early 30s, Then I got a cheap PC and started hacking because it was fun. Still doing that to this day.
I'm not a super-tech savvy guy (i.e. never had a job in the field) but I know a lot more than a lot of my friends just through curiosity and boredom. I can fix most problems I encounter and get what I need done, and know how to research what I don't know.
Turn up the variac if you want the computer to go faster, as the microcode is on the drum, and if the drum rotates faster, instructions execute faster. And keep plenty of spare tubes around because the MTBF on the tubes was about 45 minutes.
Learning to draw spirals and stars in Turtle Graphics ! I miss The Turtle - If I messed up, he never ever said "Segmentation fault(core dumped)" to me :).