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In 1997 I was doing IT classes in secondary school. One of our preferred ways to bunk of class was to ask if we could "write up our reports in the library" on

by PJDK 6y ago

In 1997 I was doing IT classes in secondary school. One of our preferred ways to bunk of class was to ask if we could "write up our reports in the library" on the RMNimbus 186s. 15 or so minutes for the computer to boot into some kind of menu system that gave you a "press 1 to start windows 3.1, press 2 to start BBC Basic" type menu, then another 20 minutes to boot windows and then another 5 minutes to start MSWord. Write three lines and then it's time for the next class!

newsbinator 6y ago
Huh, in 1997 our (average) school had some decent Pentium machines. We'd boot into Window 3.1 + a Novell Netware prompt and be able to launch Encarta or Word (or Wordperfect in DOS) within a minute or two.
- PJDK 6y ago
  To be fair - we asked to go to the library because that's where the crappy old machines lived. Excuse me while I go down memory lane... I think when I started (1995) it was a computer room with some 486s and the library with 186s. Then we got the internet, a single ISDN line shared by all of them, which was about as fast as you'd expect. At some point these got upgraded to pentiums with windows 98 or similar - in those happy days the IT people at the school had absolutely no idea what they were doing so we had a happy few months of installing and playing doom and quake over the network. I once found the IT technician going around all the computers and holding down the delete key to clear out the username field grumbling about "bloody kids filling these up", he was very impressed when I showed him how to select all...
  - newsbinator 6y ago
    I love reading this. My background is similar. At some point the "business" teacher said whoever can get at least 120 wpm in the typing game gets 100% in his class component. That must have seemed to him like an impossible achievement to motivate us. A week or so later, a dozen of us had 100% in his part of the course and got to sit around and play games for the rest of the 6 weeks.
    - PJDK 6y ago
      That's got to be one of the most useful skills you picked up in school though!?

by PJDK 6y ago

newsbinator 6y ago

Huh, in 1997 our (average) school had some decent Pentium machines. We'd boot into Window 3.1 + a Novell Netware prompt and be able to launch Encarta or Word (or Wordperfect in DOS) within a minute or two.

PJDK 6y ago
To be fair - we asked to go to the library because that's where the crappy old machines lived. Excuse me while I go down memory lane... I think when I started (1995) it was a computer room with some 486s and the library with 186s. Then we got the internet, a single ISDN line shared by all of them, which was about as fast as you'd expect. At some point these got upgraded to pentiums with windows 98 or similar - in those happy days the IT people at the school had absolutely no idea what they were doing so we had a happy few months of installing and playing doom and quake over the network. I once found the IT technician going around all the computers and holding down the delete key to clear out the username field grumbling about "bloody kids filling these up", he was very impressed when I showed him how to select all...
- newsbinator 6y ago
  I love reading this. My background is similar. At some point the "business" teacher said whoever can get at least 120 wpm in the typing game gets 100% in his class component. That must have seemed to him like an impossible achievement to motivate us. A week or so later, a dozen of us had 100% in his part of the course and got to sit around and play games for the rest of the 6 weeks.
  - PJDK 6y ago
    That's got to be one of the most useful skills you picked up in school though!?