CRASH!!!

This episode is about something that happened when our school got its first computers for some of the classrooms. And the incident I’m talking about came from my classroom! Now here’s what happened …

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hey there, welcome back to Hang On Keep Cool. If you're a new listener stopping by, we thank you for hanging out with us for a little while. And if you're a return listener, we thank you too. Hope you have a good time for the next few minutes because I have a little story here I want to talk about back in the days, probably the nine early 1980s, when computers first came out and were introduced to the school systems. Well, in my room I had two of them. Not everybody got one at then. A lot of the teachers didn't even want one, but I did. And I got two of them. But the thing about them that they're different than today, these were Atari computers, and they had no sound, they had no graphics. All they had on this, it was a black screen with orange printing. So you could read everything, but that was about it. And the other thing we could do is we could email. But that was about it. And they could try and get on the internet, and if they did, they maybe were able to read some news articles and things like that. But nobody, not even the teachers, were allowed to do any downloading of any type of program. And the reason for that was everything was new back then, and our servers for the computers weren't even at our school. They were out at a technical college, and everything was new, and not everybody knew how to handle everything. So it was just you could read the screen, what's on the screen, you could email, and you could visit visit some sites, but you couldn't do anything else. Well, one of my fifth graders I had, his dad worked in the high school, taught in the high school, really. But many times he would have to come over off school hours and do some work. He would bring his son with him. And his son wanted to go over to my room and uh quote play on the computers. So his dad asked me, and I said, Yes, that's all right. I trusted him. They were my neighbors too, so I knew them. They were very good people. He was a good student, but he was a whiz on the computers. So I let him do that, and uh it was a weekly thing. Well, after quite uh several weeks, when I came to school one morning, the superintendent was waiting at my room, and he said, I just want to tell you, uh we can't use the computers right yet, because the technical college called me and he they want to know if anyone over here is downloading anything. And I said, No. I said, uh my kids know what they're supposed to do. They can email, and that was it. Well, he said that um they told him that last night they got so many downloads coming in that their computers, their servers out there, their computers and servers, they couldn't handle all the downloads and they overheated and crashed. Well, what we found out later was that my fifth grade student, when he was out here playing on the computers, he figured out how to get into these websites, different websites, and download things. You know, they had you know how it is on a computer, if you want something, you download it, if you want a new app and all you done. So he was downloading everything he could get his eyes on, and they started pouring in out there at the servers so fast it couldn't handle all of them, and that the servers crashed. So when everybody found that out, even the superintendent thought that was pretty comical that a fifth grader, a 10-year-old boy could be crashing the servers out at a college. But it did happen, and it wasn't long after that. We got new computers. Um I think they were back then Apple Macintosh, and we could do a lot more with those, and the servers out there got bigger, and everyone knew how to operate them better, too, I imagine. So everything turned out just fine. So that's another story I wanted to share with you. Uh another day in the life of a teacher, and it's fun. I've got lots of stories. In fact, I've had 30 years of them. I just hope I'm around long enough to share all of them with you. So stay tuned and uh until we nip meet again. Don't forget to hang on and keep cool and stay calm.