What were computer lessons like when you were at school?

[OneUmberJoker]

Full of PowerPoint and Excel

Although also wasted time, when I've gone from vi into Word...

Not great. If you put you hand up to ask for help the teacher, Mr Price, would come and massage your shoulders.

I didn’t want him to touch me so I didn’t ask for help.

I spent a year in his class without turning my computer on!

I have no idea why I didn’t complain or tell my parents. It was just how it was.

Reminds me of a poem I wrote in year 8 around 1991/2 about a teacher we called "Woody" Mr Woodstock

Oh goody
It's Woody
2C's best ever teach
Of all the other teachers
He really is a peach
Around the IT labs
He let's 2C pratt
Until we turn on the TV
And start watching "Henry's Cat".

Adrian Mole eat your heart out.

I was at uni. We had those cards with holes punched and you had to wait to run them through. If you missed out a comma it wouldn’t work.

I had a whole year of IT in Y9 where the computer room had been double booked, so we just went into the classroom across the hall and learned to play chess 🤷‍♀️

Borland Pascal and C++ . Some form of primitive programming. We used to write it all in notebooks first before actually getting a chance to put it into the computer. PowerPoint and excel came at uni.

There wasn't any!

We had 6 BBC computers and twice as many typewriters - it was an all girls school so touch typing was more important that IT. Then my mum had an Amstrad PCW and I got my head round MS at uni. (Hated Word Perfect.)

I now work in IT!

I wrote my first program in BASIC in 1968. I was at college doing physics A-level and the programme calculated radioactive decay for a given half-life. It was read into the machine via punched paper tape. But that was it - us students didn't get another go on the lecturers' new toy 🙁
About 1971 I did an evening class in COBOL programming. I went out of interest, my boyfriend because he hoped to get a job as a computer programmer. We used an IBM 1440. He got a job and a great career from that class - no university degree needed back then!

He got a job and a great career from that class - no university degree needed back then!

Still not needed. We have lots of apprentices.

Good to hear. Many of the people I subsequently worked with (UKAEA) went up through the apprentice route - OND, HNC rather than degrees.

Just remembered that in the early 70s my mum had a work from home job doing these punch cards. A chap used to drop them off and collect and she had a weird typewriter like contraption. I used to love the cards for drawing and creating stuff

Great post, I seem to remember a lot of Excel formulae and a lot of time spent hovering by the "ink dot" printers (?) while metres and metres of paper with little holes in it gradually unspooled.

Bloody hated IT.

Dot matrix or an ink jet …… and with metres of perforated paper you were in the company of a dot matrix

‘Old technology’ replaced by new technology of ink jets and lasers, the dots per inch improved but if printing text then the dot matrix that could last for years on one ribbon was ‘upgraded’ to an inkjet that would jam, dry up needing pages and ink wasted by head cleaning that would suddenly run out refusing to print

Me too...
Actually very useful and I loved creating a triangle that bounced and changed colour!

I am old, born in late 60s, so no school IT lesson at all.
But we learnt to touch type which is incredibly helpful AND
I went to a summer camp for programming, learnt Basic, in 1983.