Video clip from 1981 about online newspapers

That same year I was in 2nd grade. My father was trying to get his accounting company to adopt and use the new technology. The weekend before a big presentation he taught me to write my first program and use what he was going to require of his coworkers. In his presentation he began with "I will not accept any this is too hard whining as I taught my 7 year old daughter how to do this over the weekend. If a second grade girl can learn and do this so can you."

In my senior year (1983) our school district got a bunch of (Tandy?) computers and offered computer science and computer math. Which consisted of:

Learning Basic (goto is about all I remember)
Practicing the Regents (when it was almost all multiple choice)
Playing Star Trek

Mostly it was playing Star Trek, as they really didn't know what to do with the computers.

Oh golly, that takes me back. In 1981 I had my own CompuServe account... the one with all numbers! I participated in numerous CS forums, and still have friends I met via the chats.
I remember when Phil Donahue did a program about this new thing called the "internet" -- he had a computer geek on stage with a computer (can't remember what kind), logged onto AOL, and conducting a chat session during the show.
My boyfriend had a computer at home; I used to go to his house to type up my college papers because he had "WordStar" and it was just so much neater than my IBM Selectric. You mean I can save it, then load it back and change it? Wow!!

I must have been in junior high school at the time, and remember the stash of Apple 2s in one of the labs. It was reserved for teachers; but opened up at lunch to play computer games - that was a blast! The year or two before the school my younger brother went to started getting computers and I remember fooling around with Visicalc. I remember Compuserve as well - paid a fortune to use their services!!

I was in engineering school in the mid 80's. I was one of the lucky students who had their own PC. My system had 640K (not megs) of RAM and I got the "Big" hard drive with a whopping 20 megs (not gigs)of disk space.

Now I regularly create files larger than my entire harddive. Even my RAM is 100's of times larger than my hard drive was.

I guess in another 20 years we'll be laughing at how we got by on 8 gigs of RAM and only a terabyte of file space. :o)

Interesting, I was also in the 5th grade and under similar circumstances was learning to program Basic on a TRS-80 in our school's Challenge program.

I remember taking Computer Science in high school in 1984. We had a classroom full of TRS-80's, and the cool computers were two IBM machines that everyone fought over. We learned BASIC, some Fortran, and a little bit of binary. My big project was writing a program that would flash the words to the song "On Broadway" while playing the song, one note at a time. The one thing that seems to surprise my nephews and nieces when I mention it, is using a tape cassette to save my data when using the TRS-80. I think I still have one of those cassettes from class stashed away somewhere.

In 1982 I was in 2nd grade and my school got one computer through a federal grant for low income schools, a commodore 64. A group of 'smart' kids was allowed to use it once a week after school, which meant writing programs in Basic because it didn't come with any software (or at least the teachers wouldn't let us use it). I was the only girl in the group, hence we created a game that involved bombing things from a fighter plane.

"This man's not worried about losing his job yet."

Oh irony...

... and that red rotary phone. wow. I feel old.

Whew, I'm feeling a bit older now.

I remember clock-chipping some of the very computers shown in that little video, the TRaSh-80s. That's overclocking, done the hard way - with a soldering iron. Then there was the assembly language I learned to put together a somewhat respectable sounding mono-phonic synthesizer out of a CoCo II. It was painful, but wouldn't have been possible with basic I dont' think.

All that before I was 10. Goodness how the time flies.

I had a commodore 64. Loved getting the computer mags and typing up the games printed in them so I could play them. Typos in the mag actually helped me to learn more about programming.

The prices she mentions at the end are outrageous. No wonder my mom couldn't afford it.

The Internet: The Cotton Gin for Journalist.

I remember the day that my dad brought home our first Commador Vic 20. I think it was less than a week before we got a compuserve account. My dad still has the Vic 20 and the old modem, he even has an old phone with the commador logo on the dial. I can't even remember how slow the baut rate was, although I know it was far less than even a Kb.

I remember the day that my dad brought home our first Commodore Vic 20. I think it was less than a week before we got a Compuserve account. My dad still has the Vic 20 and the old modem, he even has an old phone with the commodore logo on the dial. I can't even remember how slow the baute rate was, although I know it was far less than even a Kb.