Viking Staff Standout: Mr. Radomski

IBM Selectric Typewriter. The first computer I ever used
looked a lot like this. (I still have a
Selectric in a closet at home; it probably works.)
(www.theatlantic.com)

One day back in 1968 or 1969, my 11^th grade math teacher at San Diego High could barely contain his excitement. The district had lent our school a computer for two weeks! We were given an assignment to go over to this really little room and write a program for the quadratic formula. The computer was the size and shape of an IBM Selectric typewriter and had no monitor. If you wanted to see what you had typed in, you looked on the paper that was fed into the machine. I wrote my program, typed in some values, got an answer, and left. I was underwhelmed. Computers? No big deal. No future in them that I could see.

I’m nowhere near 100 years old, but I’m 63% of the way there. (Sixty-three is 63% of 100. See how quickly I did that—in my head even. I don’t understand how I got a D in that 11^th grade math class.) When I think of centenarians, I marvel at how much technology has changed in their lifetimes. In my own life technology has gone from black-and-white TVs to Netflix and HBO Go; from analog calculators to the Apple Watch; from computers that took up whole walls to iPhones and iPads that do so much more. Remember that scene in the movie Apollo 13?

Slide Rule. Looks complicated, right?
(www.hpmuseum.org)

The height of educational technology when I was in that 11^th grade math class was the slide rule. (Remember that scene in Apollo 13?) Slide rules let you perform calculations by sliding—well, rulers—and a plastic cursor that moved over the rulers. You had to know about logarithms. I wasn’t very good with a slide rule. I ditched school a lot in 11^th grade. (Now I remember why I earned that D in math.)

I used a paper and pencil all through grades 1 – 12 and at City College. At UCSD, I was forced to use a typewriter. My students will tell you how poorly I type. (I got a D in typing too, in 8^th grade at National City Junior High.) I made a lot of errors when I typed and had to correct them with slips of paper or plastic that had chalk on one side. Like white out—but chalky, dusty, time-consuming, demeaning. When they brought out electronic typewriters that held 1K of memory, I shouted Hallelujah! No more chalky correction tape. I didn’t care that I could only see 15 characters at a time in a little screen the size of a band-aid.

An electronic typewriter like this let me just backspace
over errors, saving me from lots of corrections. See the
little window above the keys. I could proofread the
whole document, 15 characters at a time, before I
printed it out. But the storage was only about 1K,
enough for about half a page of text.
(www.imgbuddy.com)

When I started teaching at Sweetwater High in 1987, we had a lab of Macintosh SE computers. Ooh, MacWrite was so cool. You could change indents and fonts and styles and print it out on a LaserWriter instead of a dot-matrix printer. In 1988, I came to Mar Vista Middle school, which had a lab of Apple 2E computers—and dot-matrix printers. But I was the newspaper advisor and so my classroom had two Macintosh SE’s and a LaserWriter. Ooh, my classroom sizzled with technology! Of course, kids had to take turns typing their handwritten news articles into the page layout application we used.

Macintosh SE. The case in the back was
molded so you could carry it. Note the two
floppy disk slots. This computer did not
have a hard drive, like most of our SE's.
This meant a lot of disk swapping because
the system software and the page layout
software would not fit on the same floppy
disk. (www.vectronicsappleworld.com)

Storage was always a problem in the late 80s and early 90s. Very few of the computers had hard drives (and hard drive capacity was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes or terabytes). We eventually had a bunch of hand-me-down Mac SE’s in room 304, which was originally an art room and looked like room 608. My newspaper staff needed three floppy disks to do their work—a system disk, an application disk, and a personal storage disk. To save an article, students had to eject one floppy disk, insert their personal storage floppy, click on the Save button, and then swap disks back and forth a couple of times.

The floppy disks we used in the 90s looked
like this. This is a 3.5 inch disk. They held
1.2 megabytes of data. I had trays full of these.
(See below) (www.en.wikipedia.org)

I remember a year in the early 90s when one of our students had her own webpage. Mr. Matson, Mr. Kracha (yes, Mr.), and I were talking about it. We were so envious. We thought she must be a genius. Heck, I think Mr. Matson was the only one who had actually even been on the internet. I had no idea how you even accessed the internet.

Now our students have iPads—at least until they get to tenth grade—and they can do research on the net and edit videos and make slideshows and play games—well, that sucks—and explore the cosmos and chemistry and biology. As Shakespeare said in the play The Tempest, “O brave new world.” Imagine what educational technology will be like when our students are grandparents and try to tell their grandkids about iPads. How crude and comical they will seem to those children.

At last there will be no more keyboards. Hallelujah!

This is an 8-inch floppy disk. Capacity was in the kilobyte range. They really were floppy. I used one of these (or maybe a 5.25 inch one) in my first and only programming class at UCSD. I got a B, but I was so clueless most of the time that I gave up my goal of a double major in linguistics and computer science. (Well, that and the fact that I failed my first physics test and dropped the class.) We saved our files on these. I only needed one for the whole class.
(www.everyoneisstupidbutme.com)

Mr. Radomski is a veteran teacher at Mar Vista Academy. He teaches 8th grade English, and constantly amuses the staff with his quick wit and wisdom. He regularly attends technology trainings, and is not afraid to try new technology with students. Thank you Mr. Radomski for taking the time to write about your technology history!