Overhead projectors and other old school technology

Time for a bit of a random post because, well, why not?! I remember being at school and going on a trip to learn about how the Victorians used to live and what schools used to be like.

Imagine the scene - a cold room filled with individual wooden desks, ink wells, an abacus (or abacuses or whatever the plural is!) and kids being caned by the headteacher - presumably naughty kids. It was so old fashioned and worlds away from what school was like for me but looking back now I wonder what the kids of today would think of my school.

Ok, so it wasn’t that long ago that I was in school (principally the 80s and 90s) but I thought it would be fun to revisit some old school technology!

Blackboards and flipcharts

First up is the trusty old blackboard which was still very much in use. Given today’s technology it just seems crazy to me now that someone used to stand at the front of the room and write on a big slate board using a piece of chalk. Sometimes we had classrooms with fancy blackboards that either rotated like a towel dispenser or that flipped over so the teacher could write on the back. All low-tech stuff but it worked, well kind of…

Chalk isn’t the greatest writing medium as it created a lot of dust (especially if someone decided to whack two of the board rubbers together to deliberately create a chalk cloud) and after a while the board would need a good wipe down so you could make out what had been written through the build up of dust and markings. Chalk isn’t the strongest substance and it would be somewhere between 0 and 5 seconds from starting to use a nice fresh piece of chalk before it snapped in half.

By the time I was finishing at school whiteboards had pretty much replaced blackboards. These were much clearer to read and didn’t create any dust but it felt like those dry wipe pens were forever running out - as a result many of the notes from class were written using different pens in different colours that were all at various stages of having run dry. 

Flipcharts were also quite popular and these are still used today. The problem with flip charts is they use permanent markers and they forever ended up mixed in with the dry wipe markers which as you can imagine often didn’t end well!

OHPs

Perhaps one of my fondest memories of old school technology was the overhead projector, or OHP. Quite a hefty machine, the OHP would use lights, mirrors and lenses to shine through a piece of acetate (with notes etc. on them) on to a screen. Very analogue and retro! They had to be positioned quite a way back from the wall or projection screen in order for the picture to be large enough on the wall (like a modern projector), which often meant that they were right in the middle of the room. Those things weren't always the quietest and they kicked out quite a bit of heat having been sat next to a fair few of them.

Slide projector

A fair few of my lessons at secondary school used slides. Not PowerPoint or Keynote but actual slides. Even when I was at school I considered this to be vintage technology from the 70s, which it probably was. Small framed glass windows with various photos and notes being projected with a light onto the wall. I remember the sound of slides changing or being cycled through being quite satisfying!

The big TV on wheels

When I was at primary school the school had one TV which was one of those mahoosive cathode ray TV’s with a VCR attached. It was bolted to a large metal frame on wheels so it could be taken to different classrooms. At secondary school we even a “TV room” yep, a dedicated room that had a TV in it. I spent many a lesson watching something that the teacher had taped off of the TV - often in poor quality.

Computers

Computers always fascinated me and at primary school we had one computer for the whole school. I think it was an Acorn BBC something or other. I don't know the name of it but I seem to remember a game we played - a triangular-shaped spaceship flying over a green patchwork landscape with low-polygon trees. Now I think about it I'm not even sure it was a game as I don’t remember doing anything other than fly about. I’d love to find out what this game was called! By the time I went to secondary school there were computer rooms with lots of brand new computers - albeit some of the very first consumer PC’s with giant towers and those boxy monitors (the ones that needed degaussing!). I did my bit and collected “Computers for Schools” vouchers from may parents when they did the weekly shop at Tesco. I wonder how many computers the school actually got from those vouchers!

I also distinctly remember being given a floppy disc (ok not one of those actual floppy discs but the smaller rigid plastic discs) and being told that I would store all my work for the term on it. It blew my mind how futuristic it seemed over all my other classes which still used paper notebooks.

I was lucky enough to have a computer at home so having to sit through a lesson that taught us how to write something, change the font and font size wasn’t exactly riveting!

Floor turtle

At primary school we had a mechanical turtle that we could control from the computer. We could tell it to move forwards, backwards and to turn left and right. Gripping stuff right? The highlight was the pen function as we could instruct the turtle to put the pen down so that as it moved it could draw like a giant Etch-a-Sketch. This was my first introduction to programming using basic programming (probably in BASIC) to get the turtle to draw basic shapes (you know, pen down, forward 10, right 90, forward 10 etc.).

I wonder what kids of today would think of this technology and whether in 30 years time whether they will be thinking the same about the technology that they have available to them now. With my oldest child starting school in September I am keen to see what technology they have!