Buzz Out Loud Lounge: Buzz old skool

Update: 2007

Just found my old post from 20+ years ago (amazing how things hang around on the Web). Here's what's happened since:

I did start my teaching career in that new computer lab, and I'm still teaching in the same district. Your 1984 podcast brought back a lot of memories on how the technology in classrooms has changed. I taught BASIC programming on the //c's for about 5 years, although a year or two into it we got AppleWorks, and were amazed by the word processor. It only took about three months for me to learn all the codes you had to type to format text as bold, underline, etc. (no WYSIWYG there).

Then we got a lab with the pizza-box Macs (someone help me remember what that model was called). I did all the service myself, and got pretty good at tightening loose RCA video cables and cleaning floppy disk drives - even learned to set the speed on the drives.

A few years later I was thrilled to get a Mac with not only a color screen, but a mouse and a CD drive (the only one in the whole district). I didn't have that at home, of course, so when I bought Myst, I stayed after school most days for several weeks playing the game in my classroom. Then I got a phone line run into my classroom and a modem, and was the only classroom in the ditrict that was on the Internet. Ooh, aah.

This year, several labs later, I've moved into my first Windows classroom, with XP on the machines, and found that an old Mac fan really can survive in a Windows world. (But I still come home to my Mac Mini.)

We stopped teaching programming long ago, but this year I'm teaching digital photography, video editing and web design, and hope to start podcasting next year. And I still teach word processing, but without the in-line codes (thank goodness for mice and GUI).

Thanks for the surge of memories (and for doing it straight instead of going for the camp). It was a great reminder of how far we've all come.

- Joel