Computer course in the youth center
There’s a computer course taking place at the Deggendorf youth center, which I have to take part in because it’s being taught by my friends Hayo and Peter, who are worried that no one will show up. Peter learned to program in the Karstadt shop window not so long ago, but it seems to me as if the two course instructors always knew everything. The fact that these are actually skills that can be learned, not only by you, but also by me: I will only understand that much later. But this course can’t do anything about that.
Color photography already exists and is also normal. But since there is a photo laboratory in the basement of the youth center where you can make your own prints of black and white photos, it would be stupid – and more expensive – to take photos in color. It is probably due to these considerations that the images received from the computer course are black and white.
In this photo, which I may or may not have taken and developed myself, course leader Hayo is reaching over the shoulder of course participant Martina onto the keyboard in a pedagogically questionable way. Course leader Peter can be seen with his back to the camera, and to his left is a school board on which he has written BASIC commands in chalk. You may be able to see the program on the tube TV upstairs. You can’t see any of this in the photo, even though the letters are very large (25 lines of 40 characters each.
This is what the audience looks like (five women, three men and one unclear leg).
However, I cannot claim that even one of these people was lured to use the youth center’s computer room from then on.
There is material for the course, three copied, hand-illustrated pages. They are hand-illustrated not because the instructors love drawing so much, but because there is no other option yet. There is a plotter shown at the bottom left (the box with the pen and the arm), but none of us have anything like that. Even if we had one, drawing would be easier and faster.
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The “input peripherals” devices are shown here: keyboard, joystick, not shown: “lightpen”, “touchtable” and microphone. At the time of writing this in 2024, I have a very vague memory of the existence of a lightpen, which is confirmed by the Wikipedia entry. It is a mouse precursor that allows you to point at a CRT television, and then the direction is recognized and processed, even though the television actually only works in the other direction. A bit like the magical rays of vision! But I’ve never seen anything like that, or at least only once at CeBIT. What a “touchtable” might have been: I have no idea.
Page 2 explains that hardware is “everything you can touch and break,” and that software can be thought of as “music on a record or cassette.” Then it’s about RAM, ROM and cursors.
The title of page 3 is “*** How Do I Tell My Computer? ***” The explanation begins with the sentence “At first glance, it is noticeable that most computers have a typewriter keyboard.” The rest of the paragraph is about how you absolutely have to press the RETURN key if you want the computer to accept an input, seven exclamation points!!!!!!!
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Detailed view:
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The @ symbol has been used in email addresses since 1971. For us, the course material is right, but it really has no meaning. The fastest of us will have an email address in 1993, about eight years after this course.
At the end of the course, which only lasts one afternoon, I receive a certificate:
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The fact that my name and “amazing success” are underlined is an allusion to the fact that such documents were often still produced using offset printing at that time and that individualized parts of the text were then only entered on the dotted line using a typewriter. So it is an ironic underlining that claims that this certificate was not made on a computer and with a dot matrix printer (which is obvious to a contemporary audience).
It is the only computer course I take in my life, apart from Jan Bölsche’s attempt to teach me the C++ programming language ten years later using notes on chewing gum wrappers (unsuccessfully). The rest happens autodidactically.
(Kathrin Passig, written down in 2024 based on material found in the attic of her parents’ house)