Cabrillo Computer Center (Cabrillo High School, Lompoc, CA)

[falter]

I'm currently working on a little documentary of the digital group, and it has taken some interesting turns, including one to the Cabrillo High School where David Bryant was a student. Bryant as most of you probably know programmed Phimon for their Phideck system.

While looking that up I was reading about Hal Singer and the Cabrillo Computer Center, which from what I've read sounds pretty impressive for a high school of that era. Apparently they had a PDP 8e of their own, some teletypes, and students worked on a whole mess of projects including the Mark-8, the newsletter for which Singer started and was editor for a while. Haven't found a picture of it yet but am still looking through archived newspapers and yearbooks and stuff.

I'm wondering - would I be offbase in my assumption that something like the Cabrillo Computer Center was not that common in the early to mid 70s?

Also, are there other examples of secondary schools that had that calibre of computer interaction?

 

[Chuck(G)]

I remember visiting my old high school physics teacher in the early 70s and he was quite proud of the DG Nova they had for the students. Back in the 1960s, they had the Heath Analog computer. And this was a blue-collar high school, not some high-income setup. The local Standard Oil refinery had a weekend program where they let students write programs for their IBM 1800 system.

There were numerous dial-in computer programs run by universities for regional high schools back in the 1960s. Basically, if your high school could afford an ASR33 and a modem, you were good to go.

 

[Steve Toner]

Redwood High School in Larkspur, CA had a Nova 820 ca. 1973. In addition to being used to teach programming, it ran an attendance system implemented by the students (primarily Cayford Burrell).

As far as being common, probably not. Budgets at public high schools were always pretty tight. In order for Redwood to acquire its Nova, every department had to give up some of their budget. No new money magically appeared, so each department had to be convinced that they would benefit from the school having a computer.

 

[falter]

Interesting. Ok yeah I was just trying to ascertain how likely a high school student was back then to have any sort of computer access. I wonder if California high schools are representative of the rest of the country.

 

[krebizfan]

I know in New Jersey there was an effort to get outdated minis out of Rutgers and into various high schools in the mid-70s.

Watertown, CT, had a Wang 2200 from 1976. I found out about it when the school board was putting together a funding request to replace the ineffective computer lab of Timex Sinclair 1000s that augmented the Wang since the Wang could not easily scale to accept 20 students at a time. The T/S 1000 was very cheap as Timex was dumping inventory into all the local schools but, alas, it seemed to be a case where free stuff just costs too much.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Interesting. Ok yeah I was just trying to ascertain how likely a high school student was back then to have any sort of computer access. I wonder if California high schools are representative of the rest of the country.

IIT ran a dial-in program with regional high schools in the Chicago area in the 1960s. ISTR that they used an IBM S/360-40 with 128K of memory running DOS with 2 foreground partitions. IITRAN ran in one or both of those. I recall the instruction manual had directions for saving programs to paper tape, as the IIT system did not save student programs.

I'm sure there must have been other similar setups in various parts of the country (Boston?). Recall that many of the members of the HCC used the services of Call Computer--I suspect that there were a few high-schoolers in that crowd.

 

[bnelson]

In the early to mid 70s the Minneapolis school system had an HP 2000 Time Shared BASIC system for the schools to access via dialup. My HS had two ASR-33s that got quite a bit of use and every once in a while we would get a loaner video terminal (300 baud!). In the mid to late 70s the state was implementing a statewide timeshare system for schools to access, including the state university system. The first year or two was based on a Univac 1100 system, then replaced by a CDC 6400.