Early networks

When I started in high school at Xavarian Brothers High School in Westwood, Mass. they had an early example of a network. It amounted to a shared hard drive between four TRS-80 Model 3 computers (or maybe they were Model 4s). There were also Epson MX-70 printers.

I didn't actually take the programming class, which was only available for juniors and seniors, but my math class was in the classroom where the computers were, and I would sometimes write little programs for them in the minutes before or after class.

I'm not sure if the hard drive was manually or automatically switched, or if these computers ran a real disk operating system. I don't remember the computers having floppy drives, and it seems unlikely that they had networking code built into the power-up ROMs; just BASIC.

Perhaps someone else would be eager to comment on this?

Easy A Grades

In my seventh and eighth grade years we were required to produce reports for our math class. I can't say for certain what sort of material filled the reports of other students. Since it was pretty unusual for a middle school student to know how to program computers back in 1981 I had no difficulty getting my teacher's permission to write both my 7th and 8th grade reports on programming.

For 7th grade I wrote a report that explained programming on the TI-57 calculator. I hand typed the report on a manual typewriter. I remember being up all night before it was due (I had a bad habit of doing that).

For 8th grade I wrote a report introducing the BASIC programming language. The teacher decided that I should use the blackboard to explain to the class how it all worked. If memory serves, I remember that the presentation was also attended by a trained programmer, who happened to be the father of one of my fellow students.

I knew more than the teacher about this subject, so these were easy A's. :-)