Where Did THAT Come From?

How my new classroom computer came with a slow cassette tape drive and ended up with a new disk drive after the boss said NO to buying a disk drive!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome back to another episode of Hang On and Keep Cool. I'm Mr. S, and today I want to take you back to the 1980s when we got our first computers in this classroom. I was fortunate enough to get one of them. Not all teachers did at that time because of money, but I wanted one real bad, so I did get one. And it was an Atari 800 computer, and along with it came a cassette tape player, and that was used to upload any program or download any program that you wanted to save. But if you remember what the cassette tape players were, they ran real slow, and it took forever to upload a program onto the computer, maybe 10 minutes to upload a little program that would run for about 15 minutes. And so I wanted a disk drive. So I went to the superintendent and told him I'd like to have a disk drive. And he said no. He said, we can use these cassette tape layers, tape players for a while. We don't have the money right now. So I waited, I think probably a week or so, and I went back to his office and I asked again if I could get a disc player, a disc drive, and he said again, no, we don't have the money. Well, I went down to the principal and I told him about it, and he thought I ought to have a disk drive too. And he did have some money that the we had, he said, saved up from some of the fundraisers we had. So he ordered me a disk drive, and when it came one day, just before lunch, I set it up in my classroom and showed the kids. They're all excited. They want to all, you know, take their turn on the computer and everything. And the principal kept telling me, don't say anything to the superintendent, don't tell anybody. This is just between us. He didn't want to get in trouble, I guess. Well, anyhow, at that time I ran the noon hours outside, and we uh had football teams and softball teams, and we had super teams and everything. So I went out that after that lunchtime, and when I came back to my room, there was a whole bunch of kids in there around the computer, and I knew what they were there for. So when I walked in my room, they're all one of them's on the computer playing the disk drives or anything. All of a sudden I looked, and the superintendent's standing there, and he saw me come in and he looked at me and he said, Um, where did this come from? And um I really didn't know what to say at first, and I said, Well, I think we were able to get it with some funds we had from some of our fundraisers. And he said, Well, I said you couldn't get one, but now that I've been standing here watching this for about the last 15 minutes, he said, I see why you wanted one. He said, These things are fast, and they were fast. And so it ended up good. He said, I'm going to find out. He said, Where's the principal? Are you gonna talk to me? He was in there to start with, but all of a sudden he disappeared. He was nowhere to be found. He probably thought he was in big trouble. But actually, everything turned out good. The superintendent was actually happy. And what led from that was he ended up buying disk drives for everybody that had a computer. So all ended well with that. And uh I never did find out what happened between him and the principal, but I'm sure everything was alright because the principal was still there for another 20 years. So that's just another quick story I wanted to tell you about when we got our first computers that ran on cassette tape drives, and we ended up with disk drives, and everybody's happy. So thanks for tuning in, and the next time I'll bring up something else that I think you might be anxious to hear or want to hear. But in the meantime, don't forget to hang on, keep cool.