As I reminisce about my early experience with computers I am taken back to 4th grade (1984) where I was fortunate enough to be involved in a program called the G&T (Gifted & Talented) program through the School District of Greenfield. The program was designed to challenge and provide accelerated opportunities for advanced students. I don't quite remember the criteria for belonging to this program but this is where I remember having my first exposure to computers. The computer model that I worked with was an Apple IIe and I remember that the whole Greenfield School District (4 grade schools) only had 2 of them. From what I remember we worked primarily with various software titles but I know that I was given the opportunity to do some really simple programming with graphics using the BASIC programming language. I remember using commands like Color=Green, Plot, Hlin, and Vlin. The Apple IIe used a 5 1/4" floppy drive for a lot of the software but it also had a tape drive. An interesting aside is that at my very first job as a computer teacher (1998) we still had 4 Apple IIe's that were used for a reading program (Accelerated Reader??) along with a few other popular software titles like Oregon Trail and Number Munchers. I also had 7 stand-alone PCs running Windows 95 to work with. No Internet connection - No network. Ahh...the good old days.
Soon thereafter (about 1988) I convinced my parents to purchase a Commodore 64 for me and that was my very first home computer. I dabbled a little bit in trying to program with it (again using a form of BASIC) but there was only so much a 12-13 year old could do with a computer at that time. I had a few software titles that made use of it's computing power like Koala Painter and a word processor but I ultimately started using it more and more for games. Awhile back I downloaded a C64 emulator through which you can run just about any software that they made for the C64 from HERE. While it was amusing to turn back the clock at first, I quickly grew tired of it and realized that I didn't miss it as much as I thought, haha.
Middle school came and it was more Apple IIe exposure even though it was somewhat outdated. High school came and that began my first experience with DOS and IBM-compatible computers. I owned PCs for the rest of my time from high school all the way through college. In college I learned Fortran as part of my Engineering courses and then I took some C, C++, and Visual Basic(.net wasn't available yet) courses.
My computers since 1995 have had Windows operating systems ranging from Windows 95 to my current PC with Windows 7 (I skipped over Vista, thanks goodness).
It'll be good to review a lot of this information about hardware, operating systems, etc as I rarely get a chance to play around with those types of things nowadays.
I liked to hear about your GT exposure to computers. My sister was a "boy scout" since girl scouts didn't have programming. I learned about programming from her. She learned machine language, FORTRAN, ALGOL, and COBOL. I'm glad when I went to college I only needed COBOL and BASIC.
ReplyDeleteWhat I remember most about the Commodore and Apple era is that it took a long time to load programs from storage (either cassette or floppy disk.) I also remember trading drives on Apples to determine if a problem was the drive or computer.
I liked the program on the Machintosh LE that taught how to use the mouse.
I have many fond memories of Oregon Trail from the summer school computer program I was able to take at Lincoln Elementary in Hartford. I also didn't think I remembered any BASIC, but I recognized Color=Green right away. The most distinct memory I have of that entire summer is of a rocket I programmed to "take off" and fly up and off the screen. It had several colors, and the year I took the class they had just added color monitors which was amazing compared to the old green.
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