Nicolas WardComputing: School Era
My first regular Apple usage I can remember well was the IIgs lab at Monroe Elementary in 1st grade, a then brand new space that was part of the new library addition to the building. It was the only Snow White design language Mac I used with any regularity; that’s a style I love. Being in Minnesota in the ’90s the MECC games, including Oregon Trail, were a staple. (I think this was mostly the full color version, although I remember the later Mac version more clearly.)
From A Brief History of the Oregon Trail Game. I should fire up an emulator and get myI switched to Breck for 2nd grade, and they had mostly solidly brown Apple IIes, some set up in the library up on an upper level balcony. I don’t remember having any use of a BASIC environment on these machines. In addition to MECC learning games I have a clear memory of using Writing and Publishing Center to make documents, among them a list of my favorite translations from The Klingon Dictionary. (I was really establishing my brand.)
After 3rd grade, school switched to Macs, upgrading to LCIIs in the lab and adding one to most classrooms. This was also my first exposure to HyperCard (more on that later) as our science curriculum that year involved collecting weather data and inputting it into a custom stack to track trends. Using Macs regularly at school completely changed how I experienced computers, even if sometimes I was just setting the Number Munchers high score on every lab machine (again, on brand) as I waited for my dad (then a substitute and tutor) to finish work at the school. Sadly no pictures of me using a computer at school either.
Sometime in here I got the DOS version of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary but it required at least a 286 which our PC didn’t have. I somehow convinced my grandma to let me install it on the point of sale computer at her shop (an early foray into computer security?) so I could try it, but I never got past the first mission.
In 5th grade we had a gym unit (I guess this is where it fit the schedule?) where we spent a few weeks trying to learn touch typing. It was the traditional home row method, and for testing they actually had some old Apple IIe case lids that they’d place over our hands so we couldn’t see. I never got the hang of it officially but by the end of high school I was doing ten finger hover touch typing around 90 wpm, just from writing a lot of assignments.
By the time 6th grade rolled around, we were expected to hand in more typewritten assignments. The school also got a network and file sharing for the first time (external internet was still limited). I definitely felt a little left behind turning in old dot matrix printouts with three fonts (regular, italic, or bold) as it seemed like everyone else had more modern inkjet with all the formatting they could want! Some of my friends started getting Macs at home as well, with features like CD-ROMs and video and early 3D games and music playback. My FOMO would soon end…
#apple #education #elementarySchool #macintosh #mecc #minnesota #school
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