Retro computers used in Irish schools?

BuckoA51

Hi all,

I only moved to Ireland a few years ago from the UK and I was curious about what computers were used in Irish schools before Windows PCs became ubiquitous? As I understand, there wasn't any widespread use of Acorn/BBC machines like in the UK? My friend of a similar age who did grow up here says he doesn't remmeber a computer at all in primary school, only secondary/high school, is that generally how it was in the 80s/early 90s?

SuperBowserWorld

Back in the mid to late 80s in the local secondary school we had a room of maybe 10 BBC Bs networked together, green screens, 1 full colour screen, disk storage on the network and an Apple ll.

The BBC computers were absolutely excellent with brilliant keyboards and brilliant version of BASIC. The Apple II was ... a curiosity.

The BBC had a superb version of Defender too 🤠

Free Irish public school as in public public not posh UK fee paying private school. 😃

BuckoA51

Oh interesting, so the BBC was fairly common here too? Were there any Irish developed titles specifically? if there's an Irish version of Granny's Garden I have to play that lol.

gameoverdude

Apple 2e I believe it was.

SuperBowserWorld

I'm sure it was common enough in secondary schools.

Very little commercial educational or gaming software developed here until much later than 80s ...

Steve X2

We had a BBC micro in primary school(late 80's to very early 90's), just the one if memory serves. In secondary school it was a bunch of Wang PC's in Computer Studies class with a C64 in the corner untouched and also some other sort of PC running the CAD/CAM machines in Engineering/Metalwork classes.

db

PDP-11 and Commodore Pet, early 80's

ohnonotgmail

I'm so old we had a Bombe in the computer room.

Atlantic Dawn

BBC machines in primary school, then early secondary school was Apple II's.

In primary school it was 1 computer for the entire school, teachers booked it in slots for their class and it was wheeled around from class to class.

Colonel Panic

We had a load of Macs and one Windows 95 machine.

My Dad was a teacher and his school had some C64s which we got to borrow for the Summer.

Inviere

BBC Micros in primary I THINK, because Granny's Garden is all I remember and that's a BBC game. Secondary had what were I think some 286's with Amber monochrome screens.....

gameoverdude

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119812513#Comment_119812513

Actually got a head of the game before I attended "computer science " in school.

Remember(half) a basic game programming manual with my amstrad cpc464. Good time.

Atlantic Dawn

I recall in the 80's I believe it was Lever Brothers (now Unilever) and whatever group of companies they were with had a proimotion if the school collected barcodes from their products they could redeem them for a new Apple computer. It was some crazy amount needed to complete the offer, like £1 million worth of purchases for 1 free computer, pupils gathered them from their family, neighbours and relations.

CiDeRmAn

We had Apple IIe computers in my school, 84-89

KeRbDoG

Primary school didn't have any computers for student use, but I do remember helping them after i left to figure out a standalone BBC Micro which i think was donated to them.

Secondary (mid 90s!) school had a whole room full of Apple IIe, which I only remember using once and it was some basic drawing program. I think that was 1st year, not allowed after that to use them and then they got some PCs and us dumb dumbs weren't allowed user or even near them. Di*ks

College, labs full of Pentium 2 & 3 PCs

L1011

The RML machines weren't unheard of. My primary school had mostly RM PCs by the time I was there (286 mostly). Quite oudated.

Secondary still had the Telecom Eireann one-PC-per-school in the computer room when I went there, which was just about as outdated by then - most of the rest of the machines were local PC builder PIIs.

Apple IIes in the science labs for various ancient probes and test gear; Macs (first gen PowerPC mainly) in the art rooms.

Ubbquittious

Every month or two a grumpy auld lad would show up with a cart load of coal. When he finished shoveling the head master would light the furnace after going around polishing all the pipes and valves and oiling all the gears and bearings. Then nothing would happen for hours while the thing heated up. Eventually there would be enough steam pressure to get the thing up to 88Hz. It would be time to go home but you'd show up with your program that you spent the previous two weeks preparing on a clay slab with lots of tiny sand castle shapes on it representing '1's.

You'd ask someone in 6th year to take a look at it to ensure no spindle lock would occur. If it would you could do damage especially if the machine was running fast. Then you'd ask the head master "please, sir will you load it for me?" but you'd have to wait your turn. You could see what the program spat out on a repurposed manual typewriter that would start typing all by itself much to the amazement of a row of uniformed lads standing around eagerly waiting for it to happen. If your program ran as intended you'd get a round of applause.

If you were one of the big boys and teachers pets who could make their own way home you could stay on and try to spool up the 1bps modem and send a few nibbles of data to a school in a nearby parish. You'd pray there were no leaks in the pipes because it ran on air pressure. If you were lucky enough that there was another school around with a computing machine running you could send a simple message or two and try to get a beour from aforementioned school to meet you the following saturday beneath a clock in the town.

Retr0gamer

No computers in our schools until the Quinnsworth promotion where parents collected tokens and if the school received enough they could be traded in for a BBC micro. You'd maybe get a go at some educational software once a month on it rather than learning how to actually use it.

Morini

We had (Secondary school, early-mid 80s) 1 Apple II which was used to teach programming in COMAL-80.

alias no.9

My primary school (finished 6th class in 1990) had a couple of Apple II's that were mostly used for playing Cannonball Blitz and a little bit of Basic programming.

We also received a couple of TRS80's as handmedowns from a nearby fee paying secondary school, to the best of my knowledge they were never successfully booted up.

Flinty997

I moved around a bit. No computers in any primary school. Mid/late 80s secondary no computers we had a computer class, but it wasn't permanent. Might even been an extra after school class. The room was a science lab during the day. No idea what they were c64 maybe. I don't remember being there when I left.

Apple II were incredibly expensive weren't they? Some people seemed to have very well funded primary schools. I wonder what those schools have today.

gameoverdude

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119812748#Comment_119812748

Was vax not the os?

Maybe completely wrong.

Edit: ignore. I was thinking of vms.

Jim2007

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119813887#Comment_119813887

This. COMAL was an excellent language as it combined the friendliness of the basic environment with the structure of pascal and the graphics of Logo. Sadly it died due to couple of things:

• It was expensive, the C64 version for example cost about $120-$130 a pop
• Inventors and advocates for it were mainly middle aged teachers that either died or grew old and retired early in the 80s.
• Of course it did not help that the Danish company carrying out the port for the PC lost the entire code base after several years work and had to start over, thus it was very late to market.

Mal-Adjusted

We had an Acorn of some sort in primary school. i don't know which type. i remember the floopy drive was beneath the keyboard on the right hand side. I used to play granny's Garden on it as well as some adventure game about orientiering with a map and compass.

Glaceon

My primary school had Acorn A3010s which were backwards compatible with the BBC systems from what I can remember. Secondary had Apple IIs but replaced them with Windows 95 PCs the year I started.

Flinty997

By 92-95 it was different world. Windows 3 was well established and computers were far more common.

gameoverdude

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119814166#Comment_119814166

Well feckin la-di-da with your backwards compatibility!

wotzgoingon

You guys have some memory's to remember the computers. I do not remember the exact models but in primary school there was a room full of apple computers because I remember the apple logo. I remember going into the room with no windows and a special steel door to stop them being robbed. The mad thing is we were only in there a few times in one year. I think it was 1st class. The school I was in was split into two schools. JI, SI, 1st and 2nd were in one school and 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th were in a separate school with a different name. And the mad thing is we never done computers as we got older just a few times in 1st class.

I never touched a computer in secondary school even though there was computers in the school. We were never taught them in junior certificate cycle only if you stayed on to do the leaving cert in the school I went to. They weren't locked away either behind a secure steel door like they were in primary school. I then left school at 15 so never learned computers.

McDermotX

BBC Micros in secondary, only used 40mins a week and only in the 1st year. Classic 80s Irish education.

Primary had one BBC, and an Acorn Electron of all things, but were only used for a short-lived sort of computer club once a week. Had a broken Vic20 somewhere as well

gameoverdude

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119814251#Comment_119814251

Got win 95 and some rugby game was played.

In college climbed over the gates of trinity to play quake.

I vaguely remember a BBC Micro being used in primary school for Logo. There one in each classroom in my first primary school and it was used all the time. One group would be using the computer, one group reading in “the library” (in class book shelf) another group working on some project and another group might be doing a taught traditional class and the teacher would just keep rotating us between those. Was pretty decent for a NS in that era. I never remember it being everyone simultaneously doing the same thing. There was loads of moving around.

We used to get challenges to write little programmes in Logo to solve puzzle and so on.

That and Granny’s Garden.

The BBCs were really old and made way for shiny new Macs.

We mostly had Macs after that in secondary too. I don’t remember ever having Apple // but there were a couple of relics in a computer room gathering dust.

There was a full networked lab of older Macs on an AppleTalk network. They were replaced with more modern Macs, Ethernet and internet access by the time I was towards the end of school. I think we had ISDN. Broadband was still sci-fi.

You could just wander in and go on the web (totally unsupervised) on a couple of macs at lunch time. Oddly we did sensible things like make a really basic website.

I’ve also recently discovered that Mavis Beacon never existed … all those years of typing lies!

Optimus Prime

Granny’s Garden Veteran here too, there wasn’t a bunch of computers though or even a few we shared between us. There was one , rolled into the room on a table and up the front of the class and we had to shout what to do at the teacher who pressed the buttons based on the majority of the vote.

Flinty997

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119814530#Comment_119814530

Now that's retro.

They did this VCRs and TVs in my school.

Our school was so old and non upgraded that the BBC Micros and VCR all had the big old 15amp round pin plugs.

I remember one teacher used to drag out a slide projector, that looked like it was from the 1960s to do Irish language stories. She would change each slide manually by pushing it in between clips. It didn’t have any way of holding and changing slides, just looked like a big old stage lamp or something like that. There used to be all sorts of messing around trying to get the thing level with various screw down feet. Seems that was it https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/rank-aldis-tutor-projector-slides-499483757

Also enormous tape recorders that looked like they were from the dawn of cassette technology.

We also had one of those huge front projection TVs on wheels and I remember watching Ghost Busters, ET and Flight of that Navigator on it. All highly educational…

I’m not sure that they owned it but think they used to hire it in or borrow it for special occasions in the hall, or it was some deal with an AV hire company back in the day. Very retro and cool looking thing though. There were red, green and blue projectors at the bottom pointing at a mirror which bounced the image onto the screen. Huge wooden cabinet that opened up.

CiDeRmAn

I don't I ever learning a thing from the computers in school, except ways to play choplifter without getting caught.

Pretty much the Spectrum 48k at home was doing everything the Apples did but in colour, well mostly colour.

By the time I hit college it was a PC and a room full of terminals, and when I quit that to go and become a nurse I didn't see a computer again professionally for nearly a decade.

Certainly at home I moved up to Win 95 and onwards, but in work there are still some computers that remain turned off and the monitors used for as a post-it note notice board.

johnny_ultimate

I have no idea about model but I will join the Granny’s Garden chorus. Would’ve been the mid-90s when I played it, but it was very much the mainstay for computer class. That and simple typing practice games.

Definitely would’ve advanced to Windows 98 and XP for secondary school. My main memory there is Microsoft SAM accessibility voice being used to harass either the teacher or other students! They also had typing practice software then too, and they had wooden stands the teacher would use to cover the student’s keyboard if they caught a student looking down instead of touch typing.

Retr0gamer

We had a couple of windows 95 machines in a network and a computer class once a week in secondary school. Me being a nerd I'd have the computer work done in 5 minutes and the rest of the class was setting up a Duke nukem multiplayer game.

DublinWriter

Early 80's, Comprehensive school in North Dublin, around 400-500 students. One Apple II in the library. Never used. By anyone. Ever.

In first year in 1982, we had one 'class' when our tutor booted it up and had to play 'hunt and peck' on the keyboard to try and get a program to run.

By 1985, a few of us had Speccies and C64s and home and some were pretty adept in writing Z80 Assembly code.

lmimmfn

We had a BBC micro in Primary school in 1987, only us computer geeks(those of us with 8 bits at home) ever got to use it, I think I played Elite on it once the rest was horrible maths games etc.

In Secondary school around 88 there were Commodore 64s there(I think I used them once) but were replaced within a year by Amstrad PC1512s, we had some classes on word processing and messed around with Gem on them.

Living in a rural area I never was able to get my hands on a Z80 assembly book or to afford an assembler so Amstrad CPC basic and manual was the most I could do before doing x86 and 68k assembly at uni(386/486s mainly followed by pentiums)

The Last Bandit

We had a good few 8 bits in my secondary school rural Cork (barely had an abacas in primary). Had a small computer room with Apple II's, TRS-80s, VIC-20 and a few C64s. The gangs of us that got the early buses had an hour in the mornings to use them, mostly for games on the C64s.

Few years later they introduced a computer sessions as part of science class (I think) and we got BBC Micros to learn BASIC on.

I do remember one of the teachers bring his UK101 for us to look as well.

Akrasia

We had The one Micro 32 bit in our primary school. It was used for 'Granny's garden' and to produce the school newsletter which was always produced by the 6th class kids

In secondary school, the school got a purpose built computer room filled with about 30 Dell Pentium 2s 266 mhz after Ennis won the 'Information Age Town'

It actually almost bankrupted the schools as the computers were given out for free but the schools had to build the computer rooms out of their own budgets. In the end, I think I used them about 3 times because there was no teacher who had any IT knowledge and the school hadn't a clue what to actually do with them.

o1s1n

Did anyone else have insane security on their computer room in primary school or was Bray just particularly bad back in the early 90s? 😂

It was a completely barred off cage like a prison with a big locked gate on the front. Nobody was getting in (or out!) without the keys.

Colonel Panic

I’m from Bray too. Didn’t think it was THAT bad back then!

KeRbDoG

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119822717#Comment_119822717

Na, same in my secondary school - door locked when room not in use. Reminded me that only 1st years had a set class using the (limited) computers at the time and then there was a handful of 'A1' students (I was very far away from the A 'band') could get the keys to tinker around in their off time. Complete discrimination! I remember asking when PCs arrived when I'd get a chance to use them and was told quite bluntly that I wouldn't.

Inviere

Yeah I remember the ones we had access to were quite locked down too, and access wasn't often either.

80s Synth Pop

We had a mix of bbc micro and amstrad pcw9512.

On the amstrad we played "Dr logo". You drew pictures using commands like

PD (pen down)

FD 100 (forward 100 pixles to draw a line).

Big manual on the table to learn all the commands.

On the bbc we played a game where you had to solve riddles to collect dragons teeth. I'd love to play that again if anyone can remember the name of the game??

Inviere

I actually had a PCW9512 as my first ever "pc". Complete with daisy wheel printer, which worked like an automated hammer typewriter, crazy loud. There really wasn't much I remember being able to do with the 9512, other than word processing and that logo programme for 'drawing'.

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119836042#Comment_119836042

Yeah likewise, I had a PC hand me down from my uncle's courier business as my 'First PC' but I couldn't do anything with it other than word process in whatever the software they used to log their business calls. Have zero recollection of what the computer actually was unfortunately! It used older 5 1/4 inch floppy disks which I thought were quite the novelty at the time.

BuckoA51

Wow thanks for all the comments everyone. Sad that I didn't uncover any hidden gems but cool to hear loads of you all enjoyed Grannies Garden too :)

"On the bbc we played a game where you had to solve riddles to collect dragons teeth. I'd love to play that again if anyone can remember the name of the game??"

Could that be "Dragons Tooth" the text adventure?

I swear there was a game at school I was obsessed with, to the point of seriously pissing off my teachers as I would literally go play that instead of going outside and doing PE... I am sure it was called "Monkey", and I remember a treasure room where you had to collect a pole, a dragon who made you type the alphabet backwards... but I've been through archives of BBC software and never found it.

Edit - I'm sure the Dragon game you mean is actually this one:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L71VN1Q7AmA

CathalDublin

In primary school we’d an acorn in third class, I only remember it being turned on maybe once and never getting a shot of it but do remember thinking it was pretty primitive compared to my ZX spectrum 48k.

in secondary school I remember when windows 95 came out and the maths teachers were tasted with teaching computers once/week. I had been a MS Dos gamer a good few years at this stage and had multiple PCs from 8086s to 486s, so understood how to use net send commands, change the background.jpg and the boot.bmp files on other machines in the classroom, the teachers default was to restart the computers when things didn’t work for him or when is usual messages appeared on the screen, which was every couple of minutes and let’s just say some questionable images were appearing on all the PCs and I was made to sit in the centre of the room away from the computers for future lab classes, it didn’t last long, maybe 3 weeks until computer class was abandoned, nothing to do with me just the teachers couldn’t teach what they didn’t know themselves.

CathalDublin

My friend has an ibm XT in the late eighties, I’ve such good memories or playing

digger

alleycat

sopwith

paratrooper

those games had the weirdest colour palette 🤣