Hello! Bill I think I did just top that, but everyone read on. I'll top all of that, when I was in elementary school, I got a chance to participate in a program that IBM setup using their mainframe families, and the Selectric based terminals, probably the 2741, in a remote mode. I was granted a logon code, and could spend about half an hour doing exercises. By the time it did end I was even allowed to do that without one of the teachers being present. Years later when visiting the IBM Research facility that Yorktown Heights has, I met just such a terminal, and had a chance to do stuff. The fellow I was with, well his father was an IBM Fellow for many years. To this day, when making use of Hercules to run an IBM OS, I think of that terminal when using telnet to talk to the emulator. Today, the people in my LUG, find my stories of such hardware to be odd. And think the IBM mainframe should be keeping the dinos in the museum in NYC and elsewhere company. In fact they refuse to believe that's what is managing their banking and credit card use, (still). ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 4:46 PM Bruce via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
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