Most people didn't have them, but would it be accurate to say that their existence was common knowledge?

I had my first computer in 1986/87 - they were more common to have than you think, they just weren't excellent PCs with G force graphics cards and a 2 gig processor.

Yeah we had them in school and college, great huge things they were too ! I can remember playing this fantastic game called 'Rhino' on the one at school.

Many people had computers-but I wasn't one of them.  :\'( 




Cat

Yeah we had them in school and college, great huge things they were too ! I can remember playing this fantastic game called 'Rhino' on the one at school.


Yeah? I remember the infamous 'Granny's Garden'.  :)

Absolutely everyone knew what they were, and most people had them and most businesses had them post-1985 or so. Even in the '70s, people knew what they were. According to my mom, by 1967 or 1968 most educated folk knew what they were to a certain degree...my uncle was an early computer geek who built his own computer back in the '60s.

I remember hearing about computers, but I learned to type on an electric typewriter.  My senior year in high school,  1984, I took a word processing class, using a computer, but what a pain.  Technology has come a long WAY!!!  Now I do not see how I made it through college without a computer - but I did.  When I first started teaching in 1989 - all the classrooms came with Apple IIe's  -  I think I still have an old one in my garage.  I am sure some of you will remember playing Oregon Trail - very popular game.  But I sure did a lot of work on those old computers - a lot of work.

Of course, what an outrageous suggestion! I'm sure anyone who grew up in the 80s would be offended  ;). I'm sure, with all the sci-fi hullaboola in the 50s and 60s, most people were aware of the existence of Computers BEFORE Computers came into existence.  ;D

I remember seeing them back in 1986 when I was in kindergarten so I'd say yes as well.

I did a computer course at high school in 1982.

I did a computer course at high school in 1982.


My first computer class was in the 83-84 school year.  We had to learn to program in BASIC on TRS-80 computers.

Almost everyone knew what a computer was and what it did.  At that time you thought of them as expensive, big clunky boxes with a small monochrome monitors that were pretty much a glorified calculator.  Yet, they weren't seamlessly integrated into our lives like they are now.

My first computer class was in the 83-84 school year.  We had to learn to program in BASIC on TRS-80 computers.



My school has Vic-20's (which I didn't really use) and BBC B's.  We learnt to programme in BASIC on the BBC machines.  There was also one RML machine which only the teacher was allowed to touch.

Prior to that I remember helping my brother type pages of machine code into his Sinclair ZX 81  (or did he have the ZX80?)

when i was in the gifted and talented program in the 70s -- yes, i am a genius! -- we used a commodore PET, which was an instructional computer that came out in 1977, thereabout. it was a precursor of the vic20 and all that stuff.

http://www.eldocountry.com/Computer/Pet.jpg

we did a bunch of stuff like do

10 PRINT "TIA"
20 GOTO 10

and then giggle as it printed our name all over the screen. but at first the instructor had to assure us that the computer wouldn't in fact blow our fingers off if we pressed the wrong key. we were afraid to touch them. we'd all seen "Westworld" man!

i was also in the G&T brain science class. we got to touch an actual human brain and then chase each other around the class threatening to give each other brain cooties until our teacher committed suicide.

In my first job I had to look after some PET computers.  We loaded the programme from a cassette!

I loaded and saved many a program from cassette in the old C-64 days.

I had to laugh the other day when somebody asked me if I was going "retro" when I bought a 3.5" disk drive for my computer because it didn't come with one.

Of course, what an outrageous suggestion! I'm sure anyone who grew up in the 80s would be offended  ;). I'm sure, with all the sci-fi hullaboola in the 50s and 60s, most people were aware of the existence of Computers BEFORE Computers came into existence.  ;D


Science fiction movies, television, books and comic books all referenced computers regularly (from as far back as the 1930s for pulp fiction) but surprisingly most writers assumed that the machines would stay huge and be extremely expensive and that there would only be a few on each planet colonized by humans -- yes, that's right, we would be living on a lot of planets before we would have personal micro computers.  I remember slavering over the newly developed personal computer with more than one font in the Asimov book Second Foundation -- which is set over 5,000 years after the collapse of humanity's Gallactic Empire!
I bought a Mac Plus in 85 with an external 40 meg hard drive that alone cost $1900 and was reputed to be enough memory to run 3 full time businesses.  I didn't cross over to the dark side (PCs) for another 10 years, as I just couldn't see giving up my GUI.
P.S.  It wasn't just science fiction -- there's a 1957 Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn movie 'Desk Set' about a television company trying to replace its reference librarians with an 'electronic brain' called EMERAC.

^that's true. i think computers seemed so clunky back then and they were really hard to use, so it was hard to imagine that everyone would be able to download pictures of hooters girls and argue about immigrants 30 years hence.

desk set is AMAZING. i love that movie.

^that's true. i think computers seemed so clunky back then and they were really hard to use, so it was hard to imagine that everyone would be able to download pictures of hooters girls and argue about immigrants 30 years hence.

desk set is AMAZING. i love that movie.


You know, the first image that came to mind when I was reading this thread was the image of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn arguing it out over that HUGE dinosaur of a computer that was going to replace the jobs of many in the movie "Desk Set." One of my favorite movies, mainly because it's a great way of showing the power of the human mind over a big machine.

I was young at the time, but I was quite aware of computers. At my first elementary school, we didn't have full access to computer courses as they were very expensive for our school to keep, so some selected few students were able to use the computers for a limited amount of time. When I changed schools, for my 5th grade year, my new school had a room FULL of Apple computers that looked like this:

http://users.bigpond.net.au/dbalink/Life%20in%20the%20Eighties/pics/firstmac.gif

We got to have computer class I think once every week and I sure enjoyed that. We played Oregon Trail many many times. We also had to do things on Claris Works.

Well, most of us were aware of computers, but the only ones most of us had much knowledge of were the kind where you typed programs like:

10 PRINT " IS A DUMMY!!!!!"
20 GOTO 10

"CapsLock"? - HA! Heck, we were wondering how you could make small letters!

In 1983, I started noticing this computer that wouldn't do anything I tried to type for it to do. From this experience, I sortof deduced that maybe the IBM PC wasn't designed to do BASIC computing. Naive lil'ol' me, I guess.  ;D
But BASIC wasn't dead quite yet. I got a Commodore 64 for my birthday in 1985, and was able to record a few little programs on tape. I wanted so much to have that thing called a modem where you laid the phone in those 2 holes. But those prices for the services - something like $1.95 for the 1st minute and something like 75