Moving On Up

As I stated before, I got to teach an introductory computer class at the college where I was working. Amazingly, they did not use Commodore computers in the college. That’s right, I was “Moving On Up” – just like the Jefferson’s theme song! I was getting a new computer from Apple, Inc. There was some excitement and a bit of fear as I thought about a new computer lab and new classes to teach. Here is a picture of the first Macintosh computer. Since this was the only Apple computer I had ever seen in Atlanta it is what I expected when I was first told about the class.

Amazingly, when the computers arrived on campus for the new lab they looked nothing like this old Macintosh. They were Apple notebooks similar to the one in the other picture. The ones we got weren’t quite this nice or large but that was okay since we had state of the industry computers in our lab. Wow! Apple was the leader in the educational sector during this time period. In fact, they made some great deals for those in the field of education. Almost every school could get free software with the computers and the computers were heavily discounted to get them into circulation. The programming language used was called LOGO and was pretty simple for most users. I was ecstatic to have these great computers and they allowed you to do so much more than the older versions of Macintosh or Commodore. There were other computers in use but they were primarily being used by various government agencies and were cost prohibitive for schools and home usage. Again, I was excited!

When the computers came in for the new lab the President of the college gave me one to take home so I could “master” it before walking in front of the class. I was hyper and played with my new toy for days on end—morning and night. I learned everything I could about the computer hardware, the operating system and the available software. To be honest, that didn’t take long. Computers were just glorified typewriters for most of society. The only advantage offices saw was documents could be saved on the floppy disk. For those of you who have not seen a 5 ¼” square floppy disk I am including a picture for you. We used to keep big boxes of these lovely things all over the computer lab and in every office. Remember, we were state of the art! The majority of what I was supposed to teach was keyboard skills (formerly known as typing), word processing and spreadsheets. We had not even considered programming, databases, presentations, etc. As a side note, the machines still did not do “cut and paste” or many of the very simple things we take for granted now. I was still excited! I was a little worried about teaching keyboarding skills since my only experience was a 9th grade typing class and typing my own papers in college. Not exactly the best training for a new class.

The first day of class arrived and the students were awe struck when they entered the new computer lab. They had never seen so many computers in one place and only two of the 30 students had a computer at home (see Blog on Commodore). The shiny white notebook computers (no additional monitors or a mouse) with the blue and silver apple were there to open a new door to these and many other students. I was mean that day (according to my students) and I am grateful we didn’t have “ratemyprofessor” or “myprofessorsucks.com” back then. I wouldn’t let the students use the computers until we went over the “house rules” for the new computer lab, how to use them correctly (there was a real process for turning them on and off and the order you did things in mattered greatly). But eventually we got into the class and everyone got to “play” on their computer. I got to be part of changing lives through technology that day. I had no clue where it all was going, but it is nice to look back and know that I helped to open doors for men and women who are now employed in Silicon Valley and the Technology Triangle. There is no better feeling for a teacher than to know you helped to broaden the horizons of your students.