Just for fun, since I can't sleep, talk about the computer programs you had in elementary school. We never did Oregon Trail. nor programmed the "turtle." Instead our school decided to be extra and have us all play this dorky program called "Sunburst", complete with dancing pixellated sun.
@MookyTroubadour I had a TI-99 at home, it was a hand-me-down we got in 1990 or so. Cool vintage computer, though I found the keyboard confusing. I did enjoy making a couple of drawings using the keys and key commands. I'll have to post the photos sometime.
My high school had one terminal with a phone and cradle, to dial up the mainframe at the school district center. My bf took the programming class, and we snuck in during lunchtime, to play Black Jack, which he had programmed in Basic, I believe.
So, for all intents and purposes, we didn't have computers, either.
@BlueStateBabe that's awesome!
@JeniRizio That's ancient!
@JeniRizio In my computer studies lessons at school (age 13 to 16) we started with a programming language called CESIL via an acoustic coupler on the county council computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CESIL and we then moved onto BASIC. At Uni I did COBOL, BASIC, SQL, ALGOL, C, C+, FORTRAN, Pascal and Prolog. I can't remember most of them now and it solidified for me how boring and horrible I find writing programs. 😉
@Mandypar Oh wow, never heard of CESIL. I did BASIC on the Commodore Vic-20 starting at age 6 at my cousins' house, and continued through age 12 at 7th grade computer class. We learned to plot out drawings and then program them in BASIC, saving them on a floppy.
@JeniRizio none of my schools had computer gear. I guess I’m hella old, but I had a Ti-99/4A at age 15 or so. That had Basic. I don’t remember what code I wrote, but I remember feeling like I was the shit when I upgraded from a cassette tape to an actual 360K floppy. Yeah…