When Computers Came to School (the first of several stories)

Today they are ubiquitous.( I learned that word while learning how to complete technology grants!). Not only does every school have them in every room, everyone is carrying around a cell phone with enough capacity to send someone to the moon. In fact, they have more capacity than the computers on the moon missions.

So I witnessed it all and participated in the transformation of knowledge and research. This is the story of what I witnessed as learning became transformed.

It was 1981. The first computer arrived in my office while I was principal at Saybrook-Arrowsmith. It was an Apple II. It wasn’t the more powerful IIe and it wasn’t the white color Apple famous with the early machines. It was a black Apple.

Before the Apple store, there was no real network for the sale of Apple computers outside of big cities. There was no internet, so Apples were sold by resellers. One of the largest was Bell and Howell. Bell and Howell already had the schools as clients for their projector equipment. Apple made the black version for B&H to sell to schools.

Thus arrived the black Apple II in my principal’s office with an attached disk drive. Included was one program on a floppy disk (really they were floppy). It was “Oregon Trail”. The computer in my office was one of two the superintendent had purchased for the school district. She was from the Chicago suburbs where they had money for such frills. We were given the computer and a manual on something called Apple DOS, and instructions how to play the “learning” game.

My most vivid first memory is of my custodian Kevin’s  father, Phil, sitting in front of the computer. Phil was an old guy, worked as a carpenter, and was generally known for being able to fix anything. He had never seen anything like this Apple. I tried to show him how to make choices in the game with the keyboard. He sat way back more than an arm’s length from the machine and carefully reached out toward the keyboard. It was the same approach one might have while reaching into a cage of poisonous snakes.Phil gingerly touched a key on the computer and quickly pulled his hand back, as if it would bite. The computer played a little song as the game proceeded. He never touched it again.

One thing the computer people would often tell us is that we couldn’t break the computer. However we discovered we could easily screw it up. Often we couldn’t figure out how to solve the problem we had created. Thus began the era where the kids would be teaching the adults how the thing worked and we discovered that turning the computer off and on fixed it. Leaving it off even seemed a better idea.

We were still teaching typing and bookkeeping at SA and there were no computers in any of those classes. We were lucky to even have a few electric typewriters, so computers for business were not going to happen. The Apples were a novelty, and attempt by the superintendent to bring the district into a new era. It didn’t work.

I left SA for the Bloomington Area Vocational Center, where things were happening in computers. AVC offered courses in computer programming, but not on the small personal computers like Apple. AVC also offered work on TRS 80 computers in the business classes, but there were only a few computers in the typing labs.

One of my first assignments was to bring computer technology into the AVC office. The state of Illinois and federal government required much record keeping for vocational programs. This was because vocational programs received special funding separate from general funds. The government gave money, but wanted records to prove how it was spent. Important in these records was proof that funds being spent equitably to all sub groups of the population. 

The ultimate record of programs was called the Vocational Education Data System (VEDS). This massive record was intended to show the enrollment in vocational training by gender, race, ethnic group etc. Each program at AVC (there were over 20) had to break the student enrollment down in the report. To make it easier to complete, the State Board of Education developed a computerized version to run on an Apple II. It took hours to enter the data, it ran for hours computing the results, and after 24 hours of running continuously, crashed. It could not be restarted.

The secretary who entered all of the data almost had a nervous breakdown. It all occurred just before I arrived, but the damage was immediately apparent. Bringing computer technology into the office was going to be a combination of pushing and persuading and lots of hand holding. The problem was I knew little about computers and nothing about using computers in business. After all, my only experience was successfully completing “Oregon Trail” without dying.