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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?
I graduated in 1973. What did I learn about computers there? Nothing at all.
You damn kids get off my lawn...
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...
Clueless PE teacher for me.
"If you install Doom on one of these computers again, I'll have you expelled. You could have infested every computer in here with a virus."
[the computers were not networked]
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
.....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."
One of my teachers in high school brought boxes of punchcards to class and taught us how to read them. We each got a few hundred blank cards each and used the points of our compasses to "write" our first programs (I did a Fibonacci sequencer).
All of the punched cards were taken to the University, which promptly (actually a few weeks later) sent us back a sheet of paper each, explaining why our programs couldn't be run...
A few were allowed to correct their code and have it loaded and run on an actual computer (I think it was a CDC Cyber), including my Fibonacci program. Several weeks after my compass point touched its first chad, I received a fanfold page with the first 20 numbers of the Fibonacci sequence printed on it. I was hooked.
Computing is a little more immediate these days.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
LOGO, heh. "Turtle Down." Good times.
Turtles all the way down.
Early 2000's: my brother got clueless music teacher, but it was more inane - "change the wallpaper again and you'll be suspended, you dirty computer hacker, you".
A favourite prank of mine (later in life than high school, I have to admit) was to take a screen capture of the desktop, and set it as the background. Then move most of the desktop icons into a directory.
For Vista/W7, the same can be done to gadgets like the clock and weather ones.
A variant is to set the screen saver to a picture of the user's desktop with a web browser open to something like the Rebecca Black Fan Club or an IM that proclaims "I'm pregnant!!!"
For Windows, also try setting the sounds to new samples consisting of five or more minutes of silence followed by an actual sound.
Ah, the DEC 11 series...
I worked on (and loved) a (then) ancient DEC 11/750, which was, hands down, the most robust, reliable computer I've ever worked on. Armed with 4 MB of RAM and 1 GB of disk space (3x350-ish hard drives, each the size of a full dresser drawer) it managed to provide the needs of 30 or so staff in the 4-story building I worked in. This when a 386sx was considered some pretty hot stuff - the DEC had roughly the processing power of a 286.
I was fascinated by the thing, and worked closely with the techie they called in when things went south, just because I wanted to and my boss trusted me to do the right thing. (I generally did) It was so advanced, it would detect bad memory, and not only reallocate the memory via Virtual memory to another memory spot (and log it so you knew which memory was bad) but would also identify what occupied the memory that had gone bad and pull the relevant programming from disk and continue executing the program.
Once the A/C went out, and the room overheated, crashing the computer. It took most of a day to get the A/C fixed, and when it was fixed and the computer turned back on, all the programs that had been running when it died resumed working without a hitch, it had literally mapped all the memory to disk prior to shutdown.
I was stunned. Never before (or since) have I seen such bad-assedry in a computer system I had the pleasure of working on, even though I now design/maintain a fault-tolerant, redundant, load balanced distributed compute cluster for a living, with at least a million times the horsepower of that elegant, beautiful 11/750.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.