[vcf-midatlantic] My first computer memory was using a terminal

[Bruce]

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 at 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
>