High school: we transitioned from Mac Minis and iMacs to Dell SFFs and beaten-up ThinkPad T5XXs running Windows 10. The boards couldn't be calibrated for shit, and one of the ThinkPads blue screened during a math class. We eventually got some newer ThinkCentres, ThinkPads and SMARTboards to prepare ourselves for a new decade. The school did nurture my hobby somewhat, by way of letting me take apart some beige box hanging around the computer room, "donating" their copy of Works 95 to me, and a ~800-page book in the library that talked about the up-and-coming "Katmai" processor, 95 OSR2's built-in scanner acquisition software, how the 486 is obsolete etc. The 4 or 5 eMac G4s with Tiger weren't bad though, but I had trouble adjusting to the quirks of OS X, like closing programs by their windows then by the toolbar. They had Office 2003, Tux Paint and Kid Pix going from memory. Some of them had win2k/me stickers affixed to them, and I thought they should have ordered 2000 licences to save us all some grief. I remember being very impatient and attempting to launch IE when the OS was loading services, causing me to open over 100 browser windows frequently. Really did not even learn much about "computers" in public school, most of what I knew I learned myself.Īt any rate, having seen all these advances and appreciating what it was like before, is why it irks me when the "whats a computer?" kind of people want to dumb it down and throw it all away.Ĭoming from a much later era, my elementary schools had IBM NetVista desktops with Williamette P4s (some were celerons) and 256 or 512 MB of RAM, running Windows XP Pro SP2/3 unbearably slow. Those monochrome VGA screens were really sharp. I do recall helping setting up some brand new IBM PS/2s for the employees. Not that any of the monkey fucks there had any idea what to do with them. In high school, it was mostly Apple IIe, IIgs, and Tandy 1000s (barf). I guess it was middle school when I first saw some Apple II computers. If I wanted to know something beyond that I had to figure it out my damn self. Google? No, a set of encyclopedias, a small town 3-room local library, and two parents with rocks for brains were my entire source of knowledge. I think it was my second grade teacher's husband who worked at some computer center so she always had piles of continuous feed greenbar paper for us to draw on - and mysterious "8080" code printed on the other side. Somewhere I still have the metal slug with my name on it. And some kind of green-screen typesetting system at the small town newspaper interfacing with a machine that made metal slugs to go in the printing press. I remember around that time seeing a room full of washing machine sized computing devices at some medical center on some kind of field trip. Personal computing was just coming out of the realm of science fiction. When I was in third grade, our school didn't even have computers. Definitely was the school's original server room. The PC lab had a raised white tile floor and was always freezing. This lab was very different than the Mac lab, which was like a normal classroom. The teacher got a new G4 iMac and an external FireWire DVD Burner.Ĩth Grade, 2004: The PC lab was upgraded to brand new Gateway 310x or 510x models running Windows 2000 Professional. We played Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and SimTower when we finished our assignments.ħth Grade, 2003: By this point, all the tray-loading Macs were replaced with slot loading 450-500Mhz models and upgraded to OSX. One tech teacher that taught typing had a classroom full of old school Vectra VL Tower's with Pentium's. The library was stocked with Gateway E3200 desktops, and teachers had their choice of the iMac or Gateway for their desks. The teacher had a PowerMac G3 with a massive CRT studio display. The Mac lab had a mixture of original tray-loading iMac G3's, and slot-loading DV G3's running OS9. My report card from 3rd grade had a comment of "Nick has been a great help with the computers." Ha! The computer lab was stocked with Compaq DeskPro's (EN's if I remember correctly) running Windows 98.Ħth Grade, 2002: The school had a Mac computer lab, and a PC computer lab. What kind of computers do you remember using in school? Lets discuss!ģrd Grade, 1999: We had two computers in our classroom: An Apple IIe with a green screen and a 5 1/4" floppy, and an IBM PS/2 with an internal CD-ROM drive (with a caddy), running some version of Windows 3.x.
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