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TI in the schools


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Growing up, we had an entire computer workshop made up of TRS-80 Model III's, with a lone Apple ][ sitting on an A/V cart that only the teacher was allowed to touch. A little bit later, we had a room full of Apple ][e's and a lone Atari 800 that mostly only the teacher used. While learning Forth in this classroom, I ended up selling my teacher an Atari Assembly cart for his 800, for $10. lol

 

Later on, tried taking a typing class for the easy credit, where a room full of IBM PC Jr.'s resided. Learn typing on a Jr., are you serious? lol But during the first class, when the teacher was determining people's proficiency, I was literally booted right then and there for being around 50wpm, and sent to see my counseler to sign up for another computer oriented class. Rats, oh well! haha This new classroom was full of IBM 5150's, where we learned DBase III.

 

While I would credit the TI for my typing skills practiced at home (the computer I easily spent the most amount of time typing in programs), simply didn't have them in any of *my* schools. Wasn't until the late 90's/early 2000's that I discovered a school district farther up north (Antioch, IL) had some and were still using them though. And had invested in some rare game cartridges too! Remember my son saying he played stuff like Junkman Jr. and Star Runner in class. lol

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Back in the early 80ies, we did not have computers at school. I remember well that we had a "Projektwoche" (lit. "project week", where classes stopped the courses for a week in favor of various projects) which in my case had to do with computers and which I took part in. I think they had mainly ZX-81, VC-20, and C-64 (not sure about that, though), and these were the computers that some teachers brought along. Maybe we had the option to bring along our own home computers, but I'm not sure.

 

I also don't quite remember what we were exactly doing with them at that time; I seem to recall that quite some time was spent with proper installation, and that I helped out with that - which purportedly was referred to in a local newspaper, reporting about that week, saying that a schoolboy showed the teachers how to get those things running. :)

 

Some years later, when I was in the upper grade (i.e. 1985-1988, 15-18 years old), we had elective courses for Computer Science, but I never opted for them, since at that time I had already learned a lot from my TI, and I had doubts that I'd well spend my time in those courses, and neither did I want to have my hobby evaluated at school. Instead, I opted for Latin. If I remember correctly, in those years, Atari XE computers were used in those courses.

Edited by mizapf
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My brother's 7th grade Math teacher, Ms Gray, in Lubbock purchased a TI-99/4 with the Zenith monitor in 1981. This was the first computer I saw in a school. We had a TI-99/4 at home. On weekends, it was a privilege to bring home the Math teacher's book of David H. Ahl's Basic Computer Games. By the time I was in that classroom, my friends and I had 4As and the 4 was quaint. Then TI pulled out of the market. Our school bought Acorns for computer classes.


In high school, I saw an assortment of Apple ][s. Home Computer Magazine back issues came in handy for using those. We had a timesharing PDP-11/10 where I learned its assembly language. Not long before that, when I was struggling to learn 9900 asseembly from the E/A manual, the only book I had found in our public library on assembly language had been for PDP-11. So I learned to compare the two.


I was still using a 4A and Geneve for everything when my high school converted to PC XTs, with two machines even having Windows 2.0.
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Two Commodore PETs at school, then BBC Micros in the year or so before I left for college. At college, more PETs, a SWTP 6800 connected to a teletype, and occasionally an acoustic modem session to a PDP(?) at Southampton Uni.

 

Brother had an Acorn Atom at home.

 

Anyone else remember "OPEN 1,8,15" for disk operations on the PET? Same also for the C64?

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Yep, we had a TI at the back of one of my classes, we figured out how to hack basic programs that talked and had it saying ALLLL kinds of things they never intended it to! :D Mad Libs in particular was the target of our Beavis and Butthead-like wrath!

Edited by Tornadoboy
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Some years later, when I was in the upper grade (i.e. 1985-1988, 15-18 years old), we had elective courses for Computer Science, but I never opted for them, since at that time I had already learned a lot from my TI, and I had doubts that I'd well spend my time in those courses, and neither did I want to have my hobby evaluated at school. Instead, I opted for Latin. If I remember correctly, in those years, Atari XE computers were used in those courses.

 

We were about the same age and grade level, albeit in different countries.

 

In Grade 10 (1985/86), we had an intro to computers class. This was a very general overview of the technology, history, etc. and BASIC programming. We did nothing very complicated or complex.

 

In Grade 12 (1987/88), the Computer Science class was taught by the Math teacher and it was more, well, mathematical oriented. We had to draw flowcharts as well as code programs. Again, there was nothing too complex.

 

Throughout High School, we just used Cocos. I was disappointed that we never got beyond BASIC; I would have liked to have learned Pascal. That said, it was an easy way to get good grades, and pull-up my average.

 

I did briefly consider taking Latin in Grade 10; that was the very last year it was offered as an elective. Apparently it was very difficult to find someone able to teach the class.

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My earliest experiences: first fingers, the fingers+toes, then abacus, later slide rule.

 

In Oklahoma City, ~1985, there was a woman club member who taught classes (somewhere?) using TI-99/4A's. She frequently organized group purchases; she for educational cartridges and the rest of us whatever.

 

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My school was almost exclusively Apple II land. My grade school got the first computer (an Apple II+) in 1982 when I was in second grade. It went from room to room. By 5th grade (and maybe sooner), every classroom had an Apple II of some sort. Most were IIe's, but I do remember the 5th grade classroom had a black Bell & Howell Apple II+. It was the same when I went to high school - Apple IIe's everywhere. Apple had a program going at one point that you could bring your grocery store receipt into the school and the school could turn those in somehow to get money to buy Apple computers with. I am sure that's how the school district got all of those computers.

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we had trs-80's for computer classes mostly model 4's but in the first class we had a bank of model 1's networked over cassette cables to a 'server' I made my first networked game which was a print statements racing car game that saved the high score to the network server .. totally ruined programming classes for a while with that :)

 

we had apple ii's in 7th grade in the math dept, that they would let me go use if I finished the homework, I first started learning basic off those by breaking lemonade stand and listing it.. I also had access to apple II's in highschool in the math dept again, I used to go use them while others served detentions as they were in that room, and of course I didn't have to be quiet and could play games and my peers were very envious :D

 

a buddy got a TI-99/4a from his neighbor and I started programming tibasic in ernest over there after school every day in 9th grade.. till I got my own for xmas later that year...

 

I also had access to a Tandy 1000 (PC) and TRS-80 model 4P's in a lab there in highschool. I actually got hired to tutor programming and they gave me my own lab to open up after school.. nothing like standing in line for paychecks with your teachers to put you on equal footing :D

 

Recently I saved 13 consoles and much software from the landfill in Salem OR when a teacher was tired of moving the boxes around after retirement. She had a whole lab with edu and devel software, also a geneve and multiple pboxes..unfortunately she'd already trashed the pboxes and geneve before I got wind of the situation.. there were many tears.. mine mostly.. these consoles are beat to crap but they mostly all work well..replaced keyboards and pwr supplies from radio shack on many..

 

Greg

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Grade 5 was the first school computer I saw - it was an Apple 2+ and the principal wheeled it from class to class, demonstrating it with Oregon Trail. However, students were apparently not allowed to use it, or so I was told when I asked. ;) My next school also had just one Apple2, and I was teamed up with an older student to type in some programs. Within a couple of years nearly all the schools had a classroom with a dozen or more Apple2s, and by then they were 2e's, so had more opportunities.

 

I learned assembly on the Apple 2 first since I only had the unexpanded TI at home. I didn't get any expansion until my last year of high school. I also took those machines apart, built my own joystick for them, and eventually modded one of the floppy drives to ignore the write protect switch so I could leave a goodbye note to my teacher (on his original AppleWorks disk. It was nice, just "Hi Mr Atkinson!" ;) )

 

One of the schools I attended, although they had the Apples, also had a storeroom full of Timex/Sinclair 1000s, each with the 16k pack and a handful of thermal printers. Seems before the government kicked in money for computers the teachers got together and built their own computer lab with them. I got to play a fair bit with those and the school sold one of them to a friend of mine for $20, complete. ;)

 

By the time I was finishing high school the Apples were starting to be replaced with PCs. I saw a few Macs but the PC was dominating already. I never saw a school in BC with TIs, to my disappointment (especially after hearing they were used in the states ;) ).

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In 1992 my brother had computer science and his high school teacher was so kind and donated his "old" TI-99 setup to us. He heard that our family uses the TI-99 as only computer and thought his equipment was best used at our place. If I remember right, this was when we got the very first PEB.

At school however no TIs were used in any schools.

However I was in a project class to use a TI-92 graphic calculator for mathematics, for the final two years of high school (1997-1999).

I fall in love again with TI. The clarity of the manual reminded me a lot on the 99/4a guidebook. I not only learned TI-Basic for that unit but also to program it in Assembler, even though it was a motorola 68k Cpu.

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We had Apple IIc computers at our High School. (1 classroom of about 10 or so.) We did have a BASIC & LOGO class taught at the school. Myself and another student had TI-99/4A computers at home, so we paired up whenever team assignments were performed (which was a fair amount as there were only 10 computers in the school) We both had spent a lot of time doing BASIC/XBASIC on ours, so the class was very easy.

 

In college, it was all PC-based. I did purchase the Triton Turbo XT and had that with my TI & PEB setup in college. I made the transition to the PC this way. As time when on, especially after I got a 30 MB hard drive in the XT, more and more real work was done on the PC side of things. Plus, all of the programming in my classes either used a Digital mainframe system or the PC, such as Turbo Pascal and Borland C++, so the TI ended up more for games than anything.

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Our schools were TRS-80 country when we first got computers, in 1981 or 1982. The very first computer I ever put my hands on was a Model III. I typed a "guess your number" program in out of a library book and kids stayed after school to play it, because no one else had bothered to learn to do anything with these machines. There was a definite air among our teachers of "ugh, I guess now we have THIS thing to deal with."

 

By junior high we had Apple IIe's for a computer literacy class, which split time with a typing class that still used manual typewriters (ugh). I could "hunt and peck" more than 40 words a minute (and still can) but the teacher insist I use the home keys, so I barely got through that one. Later, we learned Instant Pascal on IIc's.

 

Meanwhile at home, my uncle and one or two friends had 99/4A's but almost everyone with a computer in their house in my town had a Commodore 64. I dunno if it was our mix of department stores or what, but I never saw a single Atari computer as a kid, and very few CoCo's (although our Radio Shack was popular).

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By junior high we had Apple IIe's for a computer literacy class, which split time with a typing class that still used manual typewriters (ugh). I could "hunt and peck" more than 40 words a minute (and still can) but the teacher insist I use the home keys, so I barely got through that one.

 

That reminds me of my typing class, which I wanted to take so I could code faster. As you mentioned, the class used IBM Selectric Typewriters, rather than computers. The funny part was my teacher was befuddled with me in the class as the rest of the class was all female and tailored towards secretarial typing. (Seriously, as sexist as it would be considered today!) She didn't know anything about computers and was unsure of why I was in the class.

 

While I wasn't very fast (and I have gotten faster) learning to touch type dramatically made it easier to type code from 99er and Compute! magazines.

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