Man, you youngsters had it good! Back before dirt, they gave us mechanical calculators in HS to learn on. Marchant and Monroe are names that come to mind. This training was *job* training. Knowing how to operate these calculators could have secured a HS graduate of the era a position in a bank or accounting firm. These behemoths were a step up from my Magic Brain stylus slide adder, which itself was merely a mechanization of an abacus, which could add or subtract and could multiply by repeated addition. (I actually had an abacus, but never really mastered it. I did pretty well on the Magic Brain.) I distinctly remember entering college and longing for one of the 4-function pocket calculators that had become available by then, but at $150 (that's $1200 in 2021 dollars), that was out of the question. So I enrolled in computer classes and learned FORTRAN programming, which held me in good stead through about 1983. Along the way, I used a desk-sized Wang programmable calculator (vintage about 1971 or so) and the HP-65 pocket calculator, the kind that NASA took along to Apollo-Soyez. Bruce NJ On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 4:06 PM Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I vaguely remember when I was in elementary school in the 1970s in delaware some U of Delaware students or a teacher gave me access to a computer via a terminal. It was a simple login prompt to connect to the library and look things up and play some kind of exercises that had conditional decisions to build a story. It wasn't Plato or anything like that.
That was my first memory of computers, but I must have been very young as I don't remember much else. The thing that impressed me was how you could decide what to do next and it changed a story's outcome. I think we had a picture book that went with it (?)
I always wonder what that was all about. It was a one-day thing and that was it. Many years later I heard about something called project Delta at the U of Del but I have no idea if that was the same thing or if it was just some U of Del student looking for nearby kids to experiment with.
I remember going to the librarian in elementary school and asking to use the computer in the back office , maybe 5th grade, but there were no computers for kids to use.
I started going to RadioShack and using their computers probably in 4th grade and the Hallmark had a Timex Sinclair on display there, but I did have a family computer until the later 80s. I somehow knew BASIC, which makes me wonder if I was taught BASIC too. I remember making the computer say "Bill is Cool" over and over and I thought that was really funny at the time.
Bill