JoeCorrado wrote:

...We did have a great quantity of type writers available in the typing classes. Even some "electric" type writers! That was the high tech stuff for us. 🤣

Graduated HS in 1978.

Ah yes the typewriters! The real "digital age" 🤣. We may have had some "electric" ones as well but I can't recall for sure...
1977

tincup wrote:

Computers in school? Haha... I didn't even *see* my first computer until the summer I graduated from college in 1981. Downtown Providence RI with a couple of friends we see this "PC" in a store window, intrigued we go in and walk right up to it. We addressed the thing; "Okay Mr. Computer, you think you're so smart?", then typed in "What's one plus one?" on the keyboard thing [which we didn't have a name for]. Nothing happened... "we thought so", and walked out of the store.

Arcade games like Space Invaders, and Asteroids were pretty popular at that point though. You'd find then mostly in bars, and arcades of course. I was the first in my group to break 1 million on Asteroids - great game. First real PC use was at a job in the '86 or so.

Something like that with me as well. No computers in HS by the time I graduated in 1983. Got my first glimpse in 1984 as a University freshman - a fellow classmate invited me to the newly-formed computer club; I wasn't interested in becoming a member (or learning how to use a computer) at the time, however. Arcade games were my thing, pinball machines in particular (Firepower and Eight Ball Deluxe were my personal favorites). It wasn't until 1988, when I got my very first job at a local pharmacy, that I began using computers on a daily basis.

Besides the boring stuff like them teaching us stuff I already knew like how to use MS Word, I've got fond memories of us playing Doom deathmatch at the end of each class. I also remember being a little shit and going into all of the computers before class and changing the IE homepage to scateaters.com (I won't explain what this website is here). Let's just say that when the teacher asked everyone to open up IE, he wasn't too happy 🤣

MaxWar, that was indeed totally worth it! Great story! 🤣

borgie83 wrote:

I also remember being a little shit and going into all of the computers before class and changing the IE homepage to scateaters.com (I won't explain what this website is here). Let's just say that when the teacher asked everyone to open up IE, he wasn't too happy 🤣

I think with a URL like that it's pretty self-explanatory. 😵

As far as myself, I remember a shop class that had a CNC lathe that we could play around with; the teacher made himself an entire chess set on it to learn about it when it was first donated, and originally thought all the students could do the same, but it took that poor thing AGES to finish all the pieces with any degree of precision; as far as I'm aware it only ever finished the one set... 🙄

MaxWar: I laughed, I cried; two thumbs up! 🤣

Haha, yeah that was probably my best prank ever. Not that I did many of them though.

MaxWar wrote:

Haha, yeah that was probably my best prank ever. Not that I did many of them though.

Coulda been worse, coulda been the Brown Note. 🤣

Stiletto wrote:

MaxWar wrote:

Haha, yeah that was probably my best prank ever. Not that I did many of them though.

Coulda been worse, coulda been the Brown Note. 🤣

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wSVGOwmFdE 🤣

Hehe, do slide-rules and red-LED programmable RPN National Semiconductor calculators count <grin>? 😀 Back in my day, we DIDN'T HAVE computers (in the classroom, or otherwise for that matter) 🤣!

Haha yep they do! I had a circular slide rule chemistry class my Sophomore year, and not long after a red-LED calculator as a Christmas gift - a Melcor 2000 if I remember correctly. I was blown away by the "brain"..

Let's face it, we were still making copies with carbon paper and hand operated Mimeograph machines with that blue/purple text..

We had 486s running Caldera OpenDOS; lab superiors used its capabilities to close down game directories. OpenDOS utilizes FAT16's unused bits to provide directory password protection. It took me a DR DOS book and few hours of Borland C programming to make a small program that wiped that unused bit from password protected directories making them unprotected, so I could play Duke3D again.

From 4 - 12 there no PCs in school. From 12 to 16 they had 8086s with text based games but very rarely used. From 16 to 19 they paid me to be the network / system administrator. I installed the first shared (dial up) internet at community college. I also had a friend over to play a lot of C&C. From 19 to 23 they paid me as a computer accounting & MS Office teacher but no LAN. I did play UT & AOE with housemates during that time.

I used to organize LAN Parties for UT, AOE and C&C. I then moved to the USA in 2009 and that ended that.

Since we didn't have any computers at school, this is a classical prank that children used to do TO ME when windows had become a standard (after 1995). I was working at one of those little local computer all-in-one stores that was also providing some computer classes for little children.
They used to take a screenshot of the desktop with icons and everything and set it as the background. Then they hid the real icons and the user was trying furiously to click on the background 😀 I really enjoyed this kind of stuff, clever and without doing any harm

tincup wrote:

a Melcor 2000 if I remember correctly. I was blown away by the "brain"..

My old red-LED programmable RPN National Semiconductor calculator was really something else 😀 Heh, I even programmed a simple grid-guessing game with it 😀

Hehe, classmates would ask me to use my **Reverse Polish Notation** calculator, and then ask "WHERE'S THE EQUALS KEY AT???!!!" 🤣!

tincup wrote:

Let's face it, we were still making copies with carbon paper and hand operated Mimeograph machines with that blue/purple text..

Not to mention dot-matrix printers... companies/folks who need wide carriage printers that can print using above-said tractor-feed carbon paper.

konc wrote:

They used to take a screenshot of the desktop with icons and everything and set it as the background. Then they hid the real icons and the user was trying furiously to click on the background 😀

Hehe, I'm reminded of a prank I pulled on a few of my buddies years back:

I PhotoShopped (or rather, NeoPainted) a screenshot of Norton Commander... both of my buddies ran Norton Commander, and their wives were familiar with the program and it's uses as well.

In the edited pic I created a whole bunch of, ehhemm, "questionable" looking directories... "XXXPORN", "BIGBUTTS", "GSTRINGS", "HARDCORE", "XXXGIFS" etc..., and then created a self-displaying EXE of the image using; what the heck was it(?); oh yeah... Graphic Workshop for DOS.

Sneaked the EXE on to their PCs, and added it to their AUTOEXEC.BAT files so that the picture would display when their PCs booted (requiring a keypress to skip the self-displaying image) 🤣! 😀

HEHE, both of my buddies told me later that their wives were about ready to kill them when they powered up their PCs 🤣!!

Oh man, sorry to derail this thread... but I just HAD to dig up that old Norton Commander joke of my creation off of one of my backup drives 🤣!

Attached is a ZIP with the EXE, as well as a screenie of the "joke" in action 🤣 😀

rfnagel wrote:

Attached is a ZIP with the EXE, as well as a screenie of the "joke" in action 🤣 😀

🤣 🤣

I would have liked to have seen the looks on their faces - every husband's worst nightmare! They would have been thinking "oh shit, how did my renamed and hidden secret ZIP file extract itself in my root directory?!"

badmojo wrote:

I would have liked to have seen the looks on their faces - every husband's worst nightmare! They would have been thinking "oh shit, how did my renamed and hidden secret ZIP file extract itself in my root directory?!"

🤣! 😀

BTW, historical tidbit (loosely referring to the two fake "directories" at the bottom right of the right file panel)... anyone remember the ancient pic viewer for DOS "View Pic" (VPIC) <grin>? 😀

Wow. This brings back some memories.
I attended a private school for a little while and they had all kinds of vintage machines. Mostly 286s, but a few 386s and 486s existed (previously government/business machines, I don't remember much about the specs, except that most were Zenith brand). At one point they got a few in that had those really old CD ROM drives that you load the disc into a cartridge, then insert it into the machine. Oops, I'm sidetracking here...

Anyway, we used to program/play Quick Basic stuff on those and a few "educational games" that they loaded for us. Nice folks.
They eventually got a cutting edge Pentium II computer, operating at a mindboggling 266MHz (if I recall my childhood well enough). It was loaded with features, such as a microphone, CD drive (not sure of the speed), a plethora of programs, and a printer.
We LOVED the printer. It came with software that allowed us to color in pictures and blast through ink so fast that it ended in us getting banned from using the computer. It didn't take long for my brothers and I to bypass the password and start messing with our "art" again, but eventually they literally locked the computer in another room. 🤣

Later on, we developed a Tic Tac Toe game that couldn't be beat and put it in the .BAT file, so that anyone that wanted to launch Windows 3.1 had to play it and get a tie game to proceed. Needless to say, the school authorities were peeved. Sadly they knew exactly who was responsible and we had to take it down.

They really did have a lot of patience with us I guess. 🤣

Apple II, and a trick program called "ANDHIDE" - if you typed "RUNANDHIDE" the floppy disk directory went away - you needed another copy of the program to bring it back.

Acorn Atom - Wrote my own program to read tapes in slow format and rewrite in fast - as standard, without an option ROM or a few lines of 6502 code, the Atom only did 300baud, so the conversion of tapes to 1200 was a popular feature.

When I was in the last three years of high school (2010-2012, yeah, not too long ago), I put StarCraft on the network drive and we used to play lan games in the middle of class.

Besides that, emulators, DX-Ball 2, Pocket Tanks, Spheres of Chaos, anything that wasn't productive.

I also still used FDDs, just because. And made highly annoying sounds in qbasic.