I used these in kindergarten in Ontario in the 90s.
My first computer. I figured out the password on my own so I could play more. It was password!
Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
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Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
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#24Did it not have a Turing compiler?
Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
#25I worked for Burroughs from the early 80s; at first on B80s, latterly on B20s.
I never heard of one of these things. I would have been intrigued.
Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
#26I took typing in HS on these. Sadly the trackballs were almost always worn out or gunked up. The paint program was pretty painful because of it in elementary school.
We didn’t have any programming classes, just a room full of them for typing class, with the server in the closet.
F F F space H H H space. Ugh.
You could wander the menus of the word processor and actually dial the modem. We got endless joy from calling Pizza Pizza and hearing an annoyed voice coming from the closet.
We shared one dot matrix paper and my friend and I just split the odd and even pages and print twice because the teacher would let us listen to our walk/discman when we were finished and I really wanted to listen to The Bends.
So I guess I did learn a bit about programming :).
Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
#27Yes yes yes!!! I had these in elementary school in Northern Ontario. The blog doesn't mention it but it also had multiplayer games. I remember a few..
- a horse race game where people raced horses by answering math questions
- a fishing game where your boat went across the top of the water and you had to catch fish and lobster without snagging your line
- a typing game that did not check if you typed the correct words or all the words, and would just calculate "number of words entered / time you took", so if you started a typing test and hit a letter and then escape, it would give you a ridiculous WPM score
It's wild to think that this entire system was only for such a small segment of the population, that we'd have our own computer line. What a weird time, the 1980s
Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
#28I grew up using these throughout high school in the mid-to-late 80's. They were the perfect machine for a budding hacker because they were very close to a real UNIX system without actually being well-designed. They had networking. They had a very primitive speech synthesizer chip or subsystem of some kind - I had no documentation for it, but there were a handful of samples that said fixed words and so I was able to c…
Same ~1983, though we only had three of them at the back of the CS lab and they were never used. We had ~20 Commodore "SuperPET"s, wired in to the University of Waterloo [0]. You could actually send things to run at UW. Good times.
Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
#29I remember playing Robot R&D on these (a later version I think) in 4th grade. You walked a stick-man robot around. It has 3D wireframe graphics.
That was a good one - there were a lot of good icon edutainment titles: Math Town, A day in the life, Crosscountry Canada. We had these machines in my 5th grade class. I also recall multiple generations - we had multiple in the same class. Wikipedia seems to confirm (but with no additional information unfortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_(microcomputer))
Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
#30Yes yes yes!!! I had these in elementary school in Northern Ontario. The blog doesn't mention it but it also had multiplayer games. I remember a few.. - a horse race game where people raced horses by answering math questions - a fishing game where your boat went across the top of the water and you had to catch fish and lobster without snagging your line - a typing game that did not check if you typed the correct word…
I also had these in my elementary school in Sault Ste. Marie. Mine were also used for games only, never programming.
I remember a game where you played the role of a colonial farmer in Canada and you got to decide what to plant every season. It always stuck with me because there was a bug that didn't allow you to skip one section.