leileilol wrote:

Networked Macs. 😁

My condolences 😢

At least some fun was had. It was all System 7.

I've been through 3 computers in high school: macbook pro 17, hp preserio cq61, and dell inspiron31.

There was a mainframe in the Math/Science building and terminals in some classrooms. Dunno what it was.
I could usually find the answer faster with my TI-30 and a scrap of paper.
The College had a mainframe+terminals too and some classrooms had networked Apple-II (somethings).
I didn't own a computer until some years after School.
.

Primary: BBC Micro/Acorn A3000. Some good games of Lemmings on the A3000.
Secondary: Acorn A3000, there was one 486 PC in the library with Encarta 95. Later it was 486/33s with DOS and Win 3.1, used for Pascal programming.
Yes, DOOM found its way onto all machines 😀
University: PII & PIII class machines with WinNT in the shared labs. Mostly used for downloading.
Mixture of Sun/HP/DEC X-Window terminals for scientific stuffs. A few DEC Alphastations which were cool. Some crappy 68k Macs in the main library.

On reflection the A3000s were by far the coolest machines. Way ahead of their time, full colour and stereo sound.

Custom 486s/Pentiums. This was back in 99 or so.

PCBONEZ wrote:

There was a mainframe in the Math/Science building and terminals in some classrooms. Dunno what it was. I could usually find the […]
Show full quote

There was a mainframe in the Math/Science building and terminals in some classrooms. Dunno what it was.
I could usually find the answer faster with my TI-30 and a scrap of paper.
The College had a mainframe+terminals too and some classrooms had networked Apple-II (somethings).
I didn't own a computer until some years after School.
.

Years?

tayyare wrote:

PCBONEZ wrote:

There was a mainframe in the Math/Science building and terminals in some classrooms. Dunno what it was. I could usually find the […]
Show full quote

There was a mainframe in the Math/Science building and terminals in some classrooms. Dunno what it was.
I could usually find the answer faster with my TI-30 and a scrap of paper.
The College had a mainframe+terminals too and some classrooms had networked Apple-II (somethings).
I didn't own a computer until some years after School.
.

Years?

Mid-late 70's.
.

I recall taking a computer programming elective in HS and we used Apple II's, but that was the only time I ever used any sort of computer on high school property, and it was only one semester. However, at home I had an Apple IIe that I got in 8th grade and used all the way through college for reports and such.

We learned programming on shitty Aptivas and typing on solid old PS/2 AIO machines. Model M forever!

We used HC-85 which is an Eastern European (Romanian) clone of ZX Spectrum. Home, I had a 386 SX 20Mhz though 😀

Apple IIc's and IIe's, commodore 64, a 386 or 486, amiga 1000.

tayyare wrote:

From a badly translated document, my years in University: :lol: (1988-1996) (METU CC: Middle East Technical Uni. Comp. Cent.) […]
Show full quote

ynari wrote:

Infant/Junior school : computers? What are they? Secondary school : BBC Micro. Didn't get calculators until about the third year […]
Show full quote

Infant/Junior school : computers? What are they?
Secondary school : BBC Micro. Didn't get calculators until about the third year.
College : RML 380Z/480Z (Fortran, device control because of the I/O). Amstrad PC1512/1640. Apple II (process control/engineering). Z80 based assembly/IO tutorial board.
University : 386/486, possibly some pentium. Sparcstations. Apollo computers.

From a badly translated document, my years in University: 🤣 (1988-1996) (METU CC: Middle East Technical Uni. Comp. Cent.)

1988 METU CC was connected to EARN-BITNET with Unisys A9F.

1990 IBM 3090/180S started servicing with VM/XA operating system. The system had 1 vector processor, 128 MB memory, 22.5 GB disk (3380), 135 colorless (3191) and 15 color (3192) terminals, 2x4245 (20001 pm) line printers, 2 magnetic tapes (6250 bpi) and 2 cartridge drivers (32000 bpi).

METU CC and the university campus were connected to EARN-BITNET with IBM 3090/180S.

3 terminal rooms started serving in Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering and Physics departments.

Token ring (16 MB/s) was established on campus and connected to mainframe computers from 16 locations.

1992 UNISYS U6065 was installed with 3 processors, 16MB memory and 1.3 GB disk.

HP/9000 817S was installed with 16MB memory, and HP-UX operating system.

RISC/6000 System 32 was installed with 16 MB memory, 1GB disk and AIX operating system.

The first Internet connection from METU to the Netherlands by X-25 was established.

1993 16MB memory and 3.9GB disk were added to UNISYS U6065 and HP817S for the purpose of capacity improvement.

Turkish Internet Connection (TR-NET) was established between METU, Ankara and NSF Washington DC. A line of 64 kbps was established between METU and NSF. This connection served the whole country.

2 PC rooms in the first and second dormitories opened to help use Novell network operating system.

UNISYS B6930 system was removed.

Sun Server was installed with a 32MB memory and 4GB disk.

UNISYS A9F was closed to the access of academic staff and users.

METU-NET was expanded to 22 access points.

1994 IBM 3270 terminal rooms at Mechanical Engineering Department, Civil Engineering Department and Physics Department were converted to PC rooms. 83 PCs located in these rooms served by Novell Netware server and were connected to METU-NET via multi-protocol routers. Tatung 1041 server 32MB memory was bought with 1GB disk. IBM SP2, the first Supercomputer in Turkey which entered the top 500 list all around the world was used in METU, (http://www.top500.org/site/1145 376th place).

IBM 3090/180S +VF aged after five years' work and was replaced by three IBM 590S File Servers and one IBM SP2 (with 8 nodes) Compute Server, all running under AIX (IBM UNIX operating System).

The Compute Server SP2 (Scalable POWER2parallel Systems) is composed of 8 nodes with POWER2 processors. Serial, batch, parallel and interactive workloads can be concurrently processed on SP2 (nautilus). It is capable of processing compute-intensive jobs. There are three POWERserver 590s that are planned to provide file services as well as the processing power that can easily support the usual workload at the university. POWERserver 590 also has POWER 2 processors. Two of the POWERserver 590s(rorqual and narwhal) are connected directly to 80 gigabytes of RAID disk. Three POWERserver 590s and four nodes of SP2 are connected to FDDI network.

Systems were connected to the METU backbone (METU-NET) through the token ring cards that are on two of the POWERserver 590s. There are two token-ring cards on each machine to increase the availability of the system's connection to the METU backbone AIX operating system that runs on the systems.

1995 IBM Scalable POWERparallel System (SP2) was installed and offered to service. This system consists of 8 nodes, each having 64 MB memory and 1 GB disk. This system serves users who need high performance computing and dense processor usage.

1996 HP 800/E25 and IBM RISC 6000 POWERserver J30 and G90 model systems were bought and made available for usage, in order to increase the processor power of installed systems. Additionally, Robot Tape Library systems were installed to make backing up more reliable and safe.

Optical Bypass Control Cable

My school was running Macs (which was almost unique for a Russian school). We had iMacs G3 running Mac OS 9 until 2006 or so. After that we switched to G5. The overall experience was actually horrible:

- I recall classic Macs having a lot of issues with Russian. Often you would bring a Word document made on a PC only to fight with various font issues. Web browsing often involved manually choosing the appropriate encoding for Cyrillic text (those were largely pre-Unicode times);
- USB drives were a bit expensive and not too common at the time, so I would bring stuff on floppy disks. iMac didn't have a proper floppy drive, so you had to use an external USB floppy drive that was extremely slow and unreliable;
- around 2003 or so someone thought it would be a good idea to install Mac OS X on these machines. OS X wasn't too stable back then, and G3 wasn't powerful enough for it. Moreover, a lot of software was missing. For example, I remember Internet Explorer to actually be the best web browser for OS X because Safari was too buggy and we didn't have Firefox or Opera available on those machines.

This whole experience actually made me a Mac hater for years to come. Took me almost 10 years before I got a MacBook Air and learned to love OS X =)

I was in Highschool from 2004 - 2008 so everything I encountered in that time was Windows XP and most likely Pentium 4, don't remember what they were though. At home I was still using Pentium 1 and II computers which made exchanging documents using old beat up floppies fun. 🤣 I had a 256mb USB stick in the last two years (won it off a friend in a bet) but obviously couldn't use that since our old Win95 computers weren't compatible with that.

I used a Pii system in high school, I think it was a 266mhz with 64mb of ram or something. It was not a bad system for its age.

But most of them had had cpu fans oddly, the baring would go out and make one hell of a racket.

This is what we were using through my school career:
Highschool: 286 and 386 systems mainly with the rare 486. There were also a couple XT systems (in the CAD lab, of all places...SMH)

College: Sun workstations, SGI Indigos, 486 and Pentium/Pentium Pro clones

Systems owned personally during that time or that I had access to at home: the family Tandy 1000sx. A few years later I built my own franken-clone 286 which I updated to a 486sx-20 (maybe 33?) just before college. In hindsight, probably should have saved my pennies a bit longer and gotten a 486dx-33. In college I later upgraded that same system to a dx2-66 and then AMD 5x86-133. I believe I had something like 12mb in that 486 which was eventually upgraded to I want to say 64mb when memory prices tumbled? This would have been 1996 maybe.

I was in high school from 1992-1996, and we had a few different computer rooms. The technology department had a room of about twenty IBM 486DX2-66 machines, decent systems for the time. We secretly loaded DOOM onto them and would sneak in during lunch hour and play networked deathmatches. The room had a few peripherals too, including an HP ScanJet, a LaserJet 4, and a DesignJet color pen plotter. It was fun to fire up a plot and watch the plotter grab pens and draw sweeping arcs across a D-size page.

The journalism room upstairs was filled with compact Macs, probably a mix of Classics and SE/somethings, but I just remember staying after school to lay out the school newspaper using PageMaker on those diminutive black & white screens. It was painfully slow - we loaded each student's article from a floppy disk and would literally watch the text appear line-by-line onscreen. Photographs were placed as grey boxes on screen, to be later physically glued onto the page before the entire layout was sent to a print shop for publication.

The other computers scattered around the school seemed to be a mostly a mix of 286 and 386 systems. I remember upgrading a secretary's 286 from Microsoft Word 2.0 to Word 6 - I had to delete a bunch of stuff from her hard drive to make room, and once it was finally installed it took forever to load (probably had only 2MB of RAM or thereabouts). She wasn't happy, and that was the first time I realized that upgrading software could have a serious negative impact on performance.

I can't remember 🤣!

I think my schools did have a couple computers, but I didn't have a computer for myself back then. I have absolutely no idea what kind of PCs they had. At some point I got a Pentium II (which I still have) but I never really understood what was under the hood until I wanted to upgrade my then aging machine and figured out I didn't know how to exactly do that. And the SDRAM slots on that P2B were very stiff, I'd have to push so hard the memory modules almost got pressed sideways as they just wouldn't want to get installed into those darn memory slots 🤣. It was only after I started "practicing" on "junk" hardware that I learned that most boards had memory slots that weren't such a pain to use.

Only "computers" I used in highschool were a couple of those hand calculators. I should still have em but I guess I never considered to remove those batteries, oh well 😢

This does remind me of my old high school computer teacher. The thing I long remembered about him was that he hated MS-DOS and would often rant in class against it. I didn't understand why at the time. He mentioned other operating systems, but I didn't really pay attention, and didn't understand what he was trying to say.

It was only many years later, when I tried Linux for the first time, that I finally understood: the guy was a stereotypical bearded Unix guru who had spent his college years coding C on Unix machines. Being made to teach kids MS-DOS (this was the late 80s) must have been a living hell for him.