Lab
Students working in one of the first computer labs on the Fox Valley extension campus around 1984. No great shakes here; I was just amused at the primitive looking computers, as I sat at my own flat screen this morning, putting this post together. No evidence of a mouse, so I'd bet they were working in DOS. Our smart phones today have more computing power than those machines. Heck, for that matter, I could have updated this post on my phone. I lived through those times, but it's always a bit jarring to see those clunky machines again that we thought were so fast and modern at the time. If we only knew what lay in store for us....
picture courtesy, Menasha Public Library
My guess would be that those are 'dumb' DEC VT100 terminals, probably connected to a timesharing minicomputer. If that's the case, the minicomputer would be running something other than MS-DOS.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like a DECwriter LA120 printer in the background.
Few realize we went to the moon and back with an onboard computer equivalent to an Apple II, 64kb (Kilobites not Mega- or Gigabites).
ReplyDeleteJim Krahenbuhl