carlsson

We had Laser 128s.  They were popular Apple II clones, although I only ever saw them in my middle school and in A+ magazine ads.  The neat thing about them was they had modified applesoft character that would appear in text with CHR$(x)... there were two characters that were the "open apple" and "closed apple" that were different in the Laser 128.  Presumably because the two characters were the apple logo.

On the Lasers, I made a bunch of "Comic" basic programs that used the Laser 128 characters. they looked like a little running man figure... a little like the Intellivision running man.

I'd place him in situations and the basic program would play out the rudimentary story.  I called him "Ralston Man" (after my middle school's name -Ralston).

He was a little like a middle-schooler's interpretation of the character Alfredo, which appeared on Softdisk.  here's a link:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/alfredos-stupendous-surprise

Would love to see the icon of the characters that appeared instead of the the open apple and closed apple on the Lasers. To me, this will always be Ralston Man. 

In high school in 1990 we had a class available for the first time. It was called "Computing Math" I believe. But it was a full year long course. I think they had to put the term math in it to get it past the school board. You think they would have seen that oh yeah maybe these computer things/programming might be big someday. Since computers had been around since the 1940s and personal computers had been around for about 15 years. 

Anyway the teacher was a regular math teacher who didn't know how to program, so he was going to basically take the course with us. He would try to write the programs too, without consulting the teacher's edition of the book to get their version of the program/solution. The class was pretty small -- maybe 10 kids. I would usually finish my program first. If it was a harder program, we'd have a few days to work on it. He often would look at my program if he couldn't figure out how to write his own. My best friend also took the class, and I often helped him if he was stuck. We used Turbo Pascal for our language and IBM PS/1 computers (286 CPUs I think). They were really nice. They had like 20 GB HDDs. My Tandy at home only had a 3.5 inch floppy no HDD.

I had typing in High School 1985...(Idea!!   See my next Status update)