Yes, but because it was completely pre-enshitification internet, with so much hope and promise to be something good for everyone.

I used to write the software to refresh and update student labs like that. There's nothing quite as satisfying as seeing the entire lab reboot simultaneously .. and nothing quite as frustrating as seeing all of them fail at the same point in the boot process .. thanks to Microsoft.

Proof: https://www.itmaze.com.au/articles/zen

Sweet summer child. We learned FORTRAN on punch cards that we would send off to the regional office for them to run. Our punch cards would get returned to us with a fanfold printout of errors/output. I'm not sure I ever saw a program work correctly. Mostly because the bad kids would slip fucked up cards into other people's programs, and comment cards remarking on the teacher and her physical unattractiveness. It was a major relief when they put in a micro-lab stocked with these.

Yes I do. I was too poor to have my own "modern" computer. Yet I was way ahead of anyone else in the class. So they would just let me fuck off and do whatever I wanted to avoid disruptions.

I don't know if I miss this or if I miss being young but yes.

Maybe I just miss using a computer without ads all over the place.

I remember this extremely well, because I am indeed old enough to remember these things!

School computer lab memories:

School #1: c. 1989-1991 - Apple IIGSes with ImageWriter printers and a shared 5.25" disk box that the instructor could use to load software onto multiple machines.

The school also had a bunch of Commodore 64s that had recently been replaced by the IIGS machines. There were also a few Apple IIc machines (thought they were neat at the time, and still do!)

My sixth grade teacher was an amateur coder and taught me a bit of Pascal.

School #2:

c.1991-1993 - Apple IIe machines. Had a first experience using a Mac SE and a Mac Classic, which I thought was amazing.

School #3:

c. 1994-1997

Mac Classics in a line in the library, A lab filled with Macintosh LC3s, and another lab with PCs running earlyish versions of Windows and DOS, networked with Netware IPX. I was old enough at this point to be a student network admin.

The school also had some lingering Mac SE/30s, and a store room filled with TRS-80s, which I unsuccessfully tried to get my computer teacher to give me. However, the librarian gave me an original IBM 8086 and a monitor, so I took it home and learnt assembly.

Love the overhead projector in the corner of the lab shown. They were ubiquitous!

All but the CRTs. Too harsh. No dark themes.

Except from the school aspect, yes, a little. While 33.6 baud was a PITA, websites were built to accommodate it. And I made a lot of extra cash sailing the high seas.

Not really. I still take the time to have in person LAN parties with friends and crack out a CRT or two for old skool Mario Kart on the N64.

You can't miss what you never let go of

By this time i had already gotten kicked out of school for the first time. Lucky for me our family had to have a computer for business so I had access to a computer almost as long as I can remember. I'm thinking around this time I had my own Amega to play with.

I graduated in the early 90s and never had a room like this. But I do remember rooms with electric typewriters laid out like that

during my k12, we went from PET to apple II and gs (apple was wizards at selling their junk to schools), and finally getting out from under apple and adding a few 386s at the end.

It's the only room with air conditioning that we can be in during class time

With a little pre-planning and netsend you could scare the crap out of whoever you wanted!

The computers were always slow. SSDs are a wonderful thing as are multicore processors.

But I miss when I had a positive view of tech.

Nothing quite like that ... there was a room with RM Nimbus', which were 80186 based PC compatibles running proprietary software. And in the business studies room they had 8086 PCs with text-mode WordPerfect on them.

Science classrooms had BBC Acorns, which you could program in basic, but were of little other use for fun.

Then when I was 13 or so there were some diskless 386s with Windows 3, that booted off the network, and I was quite fascinated with them. Someone found out how to break into the network they were on, using a macro in MS Word 2.0.

I taught myself how to sneak around, and ended up putting a copy of Wolfenstein from a machine with a disk drive in a directory named like system flles ... and then drove teachers nuts by sneaking into classrooms to kill Nazis during break times.

That got me some detentions after school, lol. I didn't hear of anyone else pushing the limits as far.

Yeah, sorta but it was the late 80s and we were on apple 2’s playing Oregon Trail.

In high school the computer drafting teacher glued all the mice closed because students kept stealing the mouse balls, and then of course all the mice got clogged with gunk and stopped working.

The heat in those rooms my goodness