For the techies - What's Happening Here!

Taken in 1986. Two BBC Bs in use, two monitors, a long printout from a dot matrix printer and a couple of other gizzmos. ( A 486 in the corner but not being used). But what are these 11-12 year olds doing during lunch break?

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I remember a 486 Dave .. and I would suggest that is you (handsome as ever) teaching technology ... am I right?

Are you sure the photo was taken in 1986 as 486s didn't arrive until 1989?

 

Hi Lady. XX (Can't find the "heart" smillie)

Dave. I would suggest that what those kids were doing was wasting their childhood. At lunch break they should have been kicking a football and each other all over the playground. At that age they should start being aware that girls aren't an alien species who are useless just because they can't kick footballs.

I hope the subject was Astronomy but it doesn't really matter, they should have been out "playing" at that age. Learning to intereact with other people.
Who suggested the "project", the kids or the teacher.:th_scifD36: I give myself one guess at that:P

 

Yes Vicky ce'st moi and not a grey hair in sight. You are right about the PC it could be a 386 or even a 286 as we didn't get a 486 until just before I went away on my next secondment. I'm pretty sure it was 1986 possibly 87 as I'd just returned to school after my first 2 year secondment.

What's going on in the photo was only being done in a half dozen schools (primary and secondary) in the UK and mine was the only school in Scotland to be doing it.

I'll reveal all after there's been a few more guesses. You're on the right track though.

 

Hi Caj xx ... no the Smilies are all over the place ... or not ...

Dave, I worked for RX from 81-85 and we were heavily involved in the Ethernet ... was this the beginning of 'going on the Internet' ?

 

Cajary, I'll not even bother to dignify that post of yours with an explanation of what my school achieved in relation to equal opportunities (girls knocked often spots off the boys at touch rugby, before health and safety intervened) or what those children did at playtimes when they were not involved in cutting edge science and working very intensively ('interacting' as you say) as a team.
One of those children is now a lecturer in space science and one a doctor and one of the boys played rugby in the county juvenile squad.

Cor blimey - real science! Girls we are told don't do it, so why was Nicola (great netball player) there and enjoying it? And why on earth are the boys allowing a GIRL to join their activity? Maybe they don't see her as a 'GIRL' but as just a classmate with something useful to contribute.

Could it possibly be that successive teachers have taught them that regardless of social stereotyping, parental misconceptions and expectations, girls and boys are the same when it comes to potential achievement?

I could go on but I'll probably be wasting my time.

 

Vicky & John - You are getting close to what was going on, though it's way above most folk's heads:D

This was pre-internet though some secondary schools were using Ethernet networks.
We were using an early version of email through TTNS (The Times Network for Schools) - a very clunky and slow system by current standards. And I've just remembered that there was another primary school in Scotland that became involved in the same activity in the photo and we used the TTNS to exchange data that got the kids involved in some really interesting maths.

 

Do not complain, our eldest son started with an Electronics kit (make your own gadgets of various kinds, no soldering) a Tandy 4 colour machine, and a 1k Sinclair thing. Now he pays more in income tax a year than I earned in 10.
As for our daughters, they are all very very computer literate simply because they grew up with them in the house.
Ah the white hot heat of technology. I was in one of the discussion groups about the specifications for the BBC machine. Makes one feel very old. And now after all these years I find myself becoming more and more techno-phobic. Sad ain't it?

 

Anyone remember the days of the electric typewriter with a spell check ......being the latest high tech! This thread is REALLY making me feel weird/old! When there's a hiccup in the broadband supply here now all 'h***' is let loose - life STOPS! I even remember producing our college rag on a hand turned 'Gestetner' am I even spelling that correctly now?...time to get some fresh air i think...! Wish I could say 'ah the good old days'...but no I just love all this tech and google is a better tool than the cooker... NO I DO NOT EVER want to go back to being without my computer. JUST wish i could afford more of the great tech.stuff!!!

 

Yes, that is the correct spelling for Gestetner, but most people at the time (as I remember) had much more colourful names for them.. mostly unprintable

 

No John, though we did take part in it. I wonder what happened to all the data schools gathered for the Domesday Project. It would be nice to see it made available on the www.

In the photo the kids are receiving live weather images from one of the polar orbiting NOAA satellites.
One computer is showing a map with the satellite track in real time. The other, on the larger monitor, is showing the image received from the sat as it builds up line by line. The printout Nicola is holding shows the data for predicted passes of the sat that will be in reception range.
One of the little boxes on the left is a simple wide band fm VHF receiver and the other box contains a frame store and provides sync pulses that help 'line up' the image as it develops. We had a crossed dipole antenna on the school boiler house chimney.

At the start of each week we'd run the program that gave us predictions of passes and then the kids would switch on and listen at the appropriate times. A direct overhead pass lasted for about 15 mins and we'd start to recieve a signal as the sat was over north Africa and lose it over Greenland. If we could capture a series of passes we could get views of western europe and scandinavia and stick them together (you'll see some on the wall).

Following on from the above, about 7 years ago, before I retired, our top class became involved with NASA helping to validate the data from one of their new weather sats. NASA would email us with times of sat passes and the kids would take ground based weather obs and email them them back.

The kids gained a lot from all the above and got a kick out of doing real grown up science. Sadly what we were doing doesn't really figure in national curricula and one doesn't get any brownie points for doing it as there isn't a bit of paper with a box to tick about such activities!