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?

Comments

In my day...

[pinroot]

I graduated in 1973. What did I learn about computers there? Nothing at all.

You damn kids get off my lawn...

Re:1979?

[mcrbids]

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.