> Each Unisys ICON came with its own monitor and a very robust keyboard with a trackball embedded in it.
The trackballs were robust indeed.
Due to the client/server nature; a classroom of kids logging in at the same time could take several minutes and most of that time would be filled with a classroom of 7 year olds spinning the heck out of the tennis ball sized trackball.
One more knowledgeable teacher once told us that the this probably made the computers slower because each time you do something it has to pause and decide what to do. I guess he understood interrupts somehow.
But that logic doesn’t work on 8 year olds with a trackball and nothing else to do.
My public high school in Ontario was supposed to be a "magnet school for the gifted" and instead turned out to be a scam.
The computer class teacher was absent for a year, and the substitute teacher insisted that the keyboard and mouse cords should be neatly arranged at the end of each class as if it was a knitting class. The "coursework" consisted of learning how to type out "business memos" using a word processor.
The school believed that this was an important skill and imagined that we would be writing "memos" on computers and printing them out in the "business world."
I skipped every class I could to hang out with my girlfriend and got out with a 2.0 GPA.
The school in question has since been demolished. The whole scam was to try to prevent the school from being demolished due to low performance, so they pretended to be a "magnet school for the gifted."
The trackballs were robust indeed.
Due to the client/server nature; a classroom of kids logging in at the same time could take several minutes and most of that time would be filled with a classroom of 7 year olds spinning the heck out of the tennis ball sized trackball.
One more knowledgeable teacher once told us that the this probably made the computers slower because each time you do something it has to pause and decide what to do. I guess he understood interrupts somehow.
But that logic doesn’t work on 8 year olds with a trackball and nothing else to do.