Yeah I remember going to the "computer lab" and doing school work searching askjeves for answers.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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I remember this extremely well, because I am indeed old enough to remember these things!
School computer lab memories:
School #1: c. 1989-1991 - Apple IIGSes with ImageWriter printers and a shared 5.25" disk box that the instructor could use to load software onto multiple machines.
The school also had a bunch of Commodore 64s that had recently been replaced by the IIGS machines. There were also a few Apple IIc machines (thought they were neat at the time, and still do!)
My sixth grade teacher was an amateur coder and taught me a bit of Pascal.
School #2:
c.1991-1993 - Apple IIe machines. Had a first experience using a Mac SE and a Mac Classic, which I thought was amazing.
School #3:
c. 1994-1997
Mac Classics in a line in the library, A lab filled with Macintosh LC3s, and another lab with PCs running earlyish versions of Windows and DOS, networked with Netware IPX. I was old enough at this point to be a student network admin.
The school also had some lingering Mac SE/30s, and a store room filled with TRS-80s, which I unsuccessfully tried to get my computer teacher to give me. However, the librarian gave me an original IBM 8086 and a monitor, so I took it home and learnt assembly.
Love the overhead projector in the corner of the lab shown. They were ubiquitous!
We had 2 apple II (e)? In our math/science 4th grade class. If we had free time we got to play Oregon Trail. There was a game with a turtle that you could draw lines with. I think it was to help with introductory geometry x,y graphing.
during my k12, we went from PET to apple II and gs (apple was wizards at selling their junk to schools), and finally getting out from under apple and adding a few 386s at the end.
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Nope.
Except from the school aspect, yes, a little. While 33.6 baud was a PITA, websites were built to accommodate it. And I made a lot of extra cash sailing the high seas.
I graduated in the early 90s and never had a room like this. But I do remember rooms with electric typewriters laid out like that
One room full of typewriters, and a lab full of TRS-80s.
I work in a special place and we have a museum, with a TRS80 monitor, still in it's original packaging
So nostalgic
By this time i had already gotten kicked out of school for the first time. Lucky for me our family had to have a computer for business so I had access to a computer almost as long as I can remember. I'm thinking around this time I had my own Amega to play with.
The heat in those rooms my goodness
Yeah, sorta but it was the late 80s and we were on apple 2’s playing Oregon Trail.
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I mean yeah. The past is a perfect snapshot in time where I can imagine without also imagining the woes that happened. Great place to pretend live!
I am older so no :)
With a little pre-planning and netsend you could scare the crap out of whoever you wanted!
Nothing quite like that ... there was a room with RM Nimbus', which were 80186 based PC compatibles running proprietary software. And in the business studies room they had 8086 PCs with text-mode WordPerfect on them.
Science classrooms had BBC Acorns, which you could program in basic, but were of little other use for fun.
Then when I was 13 or so there were some diskless 386s with Windows 3, that booted off the network, and I was quite fascinated with them. Someone found out how to break into the network they were on, using a macro in MS Word 2.0.
I taught myself how to sneak around, and ended up putting a copy of Wolfenstein from a machine with a disk drive in a directory named like system flles ... and then drove teachers nuts by sneaking into classrooms to kill Nazis during break times.
That got me some detentions after school, lol. I didn't hear of anyone else pushing the limits as far.
In high school the computer drafting teacher glued all the mice closed because students kept stealing the mouse balls, and then of course all the mice got clogged with gunk and stopped working.
He didn’t know how they worked, or? Like might as well take them away.
I am not old enough but my school still used to run Windows 7 at least and god those screensavers are nostalgic, so many good memories, of course I miss those days they were the best days, only gets downhill from there, I was always the computer nerd burning shit down and getting kicked out :(