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10 THINGS THAT ALWAYS HAPPENED IN COMPUTER CLUB

2/8/2017

22 Comments

 
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Are you old enough to remember Computer Club? Do schools even have computer clubs now, given that modern children are handed a high-powered gaming laptop and a smartphone the second they're born, and told not to bother their parents until they're old enough to go to the pub with them?

Back in the '80s and '90s, school computer clubs were the only way most pupils had access to the sort of computers that their parents could never afford to have at home - the BBC Micro, or a nice PC for example. Well, unless those parents were posh parents. The less said about them the better.

Here are ten things that happened in every Computer Club throughout the country.
THE TEACHER WOULD ASK YOU TO HACK HIS EX-WIFE
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Though Computer Club existed before the internet and modems, everyone had seen the movie War Games, in which that boy hacked NATO, or something.

Often, the forlorn Computer Club Teacher (CCT) would wander from child to child asking if it was possible for them to hack his ex-wife, seemingly without really knowing what that meant.

​When members of Computer Club would look blankly, or say things such as "Huuruuuuuunnhhh-ah?!?", and "You mean like in the film called War Games?", and "Specify exactly what you mean, please", teacher would simply slither off his chair without saying a word, and - with his arms motionless at his side - somehow continue sliding along the floor and out of the classroom, to the accompaniment of a sort of mournful slide whistle-type noise.
MAKING A SHOPPING LIST FOR BRONK'S FUNERAL
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Sometimes, Teacher would storm into Computer Club, tell you all to stop what you were doing, and start planning for Bronk's Funeral. Specifically, he'd demand you be responsible for the finger buffet - insisting you add to the list items such as Pot Noodle thimbles, corn-based snacks, and "lashings of out-of-date Quattro".
SOMEBODY WOULD GET TOO SCARE!
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Remember the game Granny's Garden - an educational adventure game for the BBC Micro? Do you remember the witch?

Do you remember when somebody was unexpectedly grabbed by the witch and got so scare that the skellington jumped out of their skin and started dancing around the classroom, with its teeth chattering, and then it'd start singing "Dem Bones"?

​Yes. Yes you do, because it happened at least once every Computer Club.
THE CHIPTUNE SCHOOL ORCHESTRA
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Every school had an orchestra, but it wasn't until the late-1980s that schools caught up with the modern era, and formed the first computer orchestras.

With each computer processing a single note - which in itself would take upwards of an hour - it sometimes required as many as twenty computers to play a single bar of music. If any orchestra member had inputted the code incorrectly, it could ruin everything - and thus would ensue a dull and time-consuming task to find the error.

The pupil responsible would then be banished for one standard month - no more, no less - to The Well of Screams.
WHAT WAS BEHIND THE BLUE DOOR?
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Nobody knew what was behind The Blue Door. Oh, everyone had their theories - that was where teacher's ex-wife now lived with her new lover... it was a room full of femurs... it concealed a fold in space-time through which a thousand unspeakable horrors/swans would spill were the door ever to be opened.

Pupils would spend hours inputting the evidence into the computer, only for teacher to storm over and pull the plug before any satisfactory conclusions could be reached.
MAKING ILLEGAL COPIES OF YOURSELF
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One of the most fun things to do in Computer Club was to confound and irritate Teacher by using the available technology to make illegal copies of yourself.

The second he was out of the room, everyone would quickly tap their personal data numeric into the computers and press the big brown button marked "duplicate". When he would return, he'd have no idea who the original students were! He'd lose his temper, begin huffing and honking like a distressed goose, then start battering the semi-mindless clones with a lacrosse racquet until all were smote.

​Yes, you'd get a detention or two, but it was worth it for the LOLOLs!
DESTROYING VARIABLE STARS
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The funnest day ever in Computer Club was the day that teacher had a nervous breakdown, and told you that it was time to use the computers to destroy variable stars.

A few lines of code was all it took to grant you the power to detonate life-giving plasma spheres many thousands of light years hence. Admittedly, the cosmic destruction would be catastrophic - but your vantage point behind a computer monitor shielded you from a comparable and appropriate level of guilt.
TEACHER'S MANY STORIES
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How many times during Computer Club were you in the middle of typing a line of code, and were interrupted by Teacher leaning over your shoulder, pointing at the screen, and saying: "That reminds me of my ex-wife. She ran off with a brave top cop called Donny Ronson... I've never been brave - even when it comes to confronting my own emotions"?

Answer: many times, usually followed by Teacher giving you a full and necessarily detailed account of how he came home from work to find the two of them dancing lewdly in the shed, while he blinked strangely, and a little hat kept appearing and disappearing on the top of his head as if by magic.
THE BAD KIDS
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Normally, Computer Club was reserved for the nice children, but occasionally a bad kid or two would sneak in, even though nobody really wanted them there because they changed the dynamic, and everyone was a little bit scare of him or her, and the teacher couldn't really turn them away because, well, Computer Club was meant to be for everyone, even though we all knew it wasn't really.

Anyway, sometimes the naughty interloper would misbehave - perhaps by typing a rudey into a computer, or doing racism - and need to be punished.

Relieved that they had shown their true colours and given him the excuse he needed, Teacher would sit them in a corner to play computer chess against Korky Snapperz, The Grim Reaper. Failure would mean but one thing: INSTANT DEATH.
THE COOL KIDS
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Every Computer Club had a group known as the Cool Kids, who were made up of the coolest kids in Computer Club. Oh, we'd all be disparaging behind their backs, but secretly we yearned for the acceptance of The Cool Kids.

​Of course, we all know now that the Cool Kids were only really cool kids because they were a bit middle class, and had nice hair that behaved, and were sufficiently repressed/insecure that they never really did anything to stand out enough to get bullied. Frankly, they were the cool kids because they were so utterly nondescript - and good for them.

Cool Kids L-R: Brock, Pippin, Lames, O'Brames and Tot.
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22 Comments
Dan Whitehead
2/8/2017 09:36:14 am

Pippin left school halfway through term, and everyone said he'd gone to a different school but really we knew he was dead because he done a drugs.

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Darth Tinder
2/8/2017 09:39:36 am

Someone once got expelled from my school for doing a "Tekken move" on someone.

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RichardM
2/8/2017 09:46:49 am

Two computer club memories:

1) The older boy who had written his own boot loader with a big picture of the TNG Enterprise in the middle. He was well cool.

2) Everyone using the reset button on the side of the original Macintosh to fuck over the person sitting next to them 20 times every lesson (in the 'Macintosh lab').

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Jim Leighton (Future World Darts Champion) x
2/8/2017 09:56:10 am

Not really Computer Club, but in my IT lesson, my computer was hooked up to a large monitor which would be used to show how to do something on a computer and that.

Anyways, my IT teacher 'Disco Dave' was a volatile chap who had a nifty trick of rendering pupils near paralysed by applying the Vulcan Death Grip to your elbow, so he was not to be messed with, but it was funny when he blew up.

One day, I had got hold of a copy of Fireball II for the Archimedes computer, gave my mates a copy and we were all playing away, I had forgotten I was hooked up to the fancy 2nd monitor when some bint shouted "OI SIIIIIIR! James is playing games during lessons". Next thing 'Disco Dave' rushed over and applied the Vulcan Death grip to my elbow, I lost all sensible movement to my limbs and I was led out of the class walking like Mr Soft (off them mint adverts) and got a right bollocking. Good Times!

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Picston Shottle
2/8/2017 11:18:25 am

Our IT teacher was "Chaz" and he had the requisite massive bunch of keys that came with the massive responsibility of not getting the computers nicked from a rough city center school, also being the school minibus driver; it was a fuckin' massive bunch of keys. He probably should have been a jailer. Anyway, when "Chaz" lost it he'd throw the bunch of keys at the offender. He never missed and he didn't pull his throw either. He properly launched the bunch of spiky metal.

His other, non lethal, control method was to tell you to go and walk to the top of the hill behind the school which his classroom over looked, and when you got to the top stand there and wave until he waved back. Somebody once wrote in the snow on the hill "Chaz chugs cocks" rather than doing the requisite wave.

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Neptunium
2/8/2017 11:10:13 am

We never had computer clubs, but where I lived we weren't posh enough to have BBC Micros, we had an assortment of pre-PC era Z80 based "RM" hardware which no-one could work out how to boot up.

When the person who could boot it up was in, we used to play with the Logo turtle. This was awesome in my tiny mind - you would write programs which controlled a robot turtle, and using commands you could make it DROP it's pen on a piece of paper and make it draw stuff - by commands you typed into the machines!!! I think even if they had the same hardware now my kids would lap it up and demand to play with it - getting to control such wonderfulness by your keyboard inputs was just magical and possibly (along with playing shitloads of speccy games) the reason I do what I do today (drink).

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Kelvin Green link
2/8/2017 07:13:42 pm

Yes, those turtles were everywhere. Every Computer Club had at least one and you'd spend ages typing in commands to make it draw a big picture on the floor with its pen.

But where are all the turtles now? What are they doing? Are they still drawing? Or are they doing SOMETHING ELSE?

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Gaijintendo
2/8/2017 11:25:46 am

I know this isn't all about me. But I was reminded of a photo I saw, back before the internet was cool.

http://www.tegperu.org/photos/frontline8/bbs_tvs_bull.jpg

Simpler times. I want to dress as this guy for Halloween.

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Chris Wyatt
2/8/2017 11:54:32 am

We had a couple of BBC Micros at school, a CD-ROM PC, and a bunch of RM Nimbus PCs. I briefly got to co-run a computer club with a couple of my mates during lunchtime, but teach came in to find them both having a scrap (I wasn't involved), so computer club got canned :(.

Secondary school, I was browsing the network share, and managed to find a video of the headteachers wife, pregnant, with her boobs out! I guess he had put them in his shared folder for staff to look at? Odd thing to share.

I got in trouble quite a lot, messing with the computers at school. Fun days.

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John
2/8/2017 12:57:50 pm

I recently met Peter Schwartz who was a thoroughly nice chap and who's CV made you feel thoroughly inferior. Among his many and varied achievements was the time he worked as creative consultant on the movie Wargames, reworking the premise to mirror his experiences hacking the military simulators on SRI.
https://www.wired.com/2008/07/ff-wargames/
Spent a couple hours with him - he never once mentioned his ex-wife.

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Mrtankthreat
2/8/2017 02:02:40 pm

Computer in our school was never during regular school hours so you'd have to stay behind to get the opportunity which at least kept the "bad" children away. All we really did though was play that game that was like the precursor to Worms where there were two gorillas on skyscrapers and you had to launch bananas at your opponent by typing in the angle of trajectory and then the speed. Good times.

There was also the mysterious door but it weren't blue in my school. It was a very ugly tope colour and had a sheen on it that made it look constantly freshly painted which made us even more afraid to go near it.

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Nige
2/8/2017 02:11:47 pm

At my school pushing programs to other Beebs on the network (to make them play, say, the Airwolf theme tune, all at once, slightly out of time with each other) was very much frowned upon. I did that a lot.

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Dr. Budd Buttocks, MD
2/8/2017 02:30:45 pm

I and a couple of other kids in my class were the computer "wizzes" at primary school. We were accused of "hacking" where instead of playing Table Worms (anyone remember that?) on the BBC micros, we instead decided to show the Basic program listing and change words in it, like "points" to "poopoo" and so on.
We redeemed ourselves by typing in a load of games from one of those Usborne books and wrote a custom menu to load them from disk, and made a copy for every classroom that had a computer.

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Fred the Shifty School Caretaker
2/8/2017 06:54:20 pm

That bottom photo - definitely how my school in a poor area was in the mid 80's.

Once a year a single BBC computer was brought into the classroom on a trolley.

Kids would be called 4 at a time to sit at the computer. Each group would get 10 minutes which equated to just over 2 minutes each per kid.

Given that we had never seen or used a QUERTY keyboard before, it took our entire 2 minute allocation just to find the button that started the Witch game. At that point the teacher would say "times up" and you would have to shuffle over to let the next kid have a go. Rinse and repeat.


This was on a good day.

On a bad day the teacher couldn't get it to work. She would then leave the classroom to find the one teacher in the entire school who "sort of" knew how to use it. She would come back, say that he was off sick and the computer would be taken away. See you again next year.

I'd be flipping burgers in Mac D's right now if my father hadn't spent some of his redundancy money buying us a ZX Speccy from good old Sir Clive.

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Starbuck
2/8/2017 07:25:37 pm

Our computer teacher used to hold naughty pupils upside down and throw the blackboard rubber at them (not at the same time). Not very techno-literate of him.

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The BBC Micro Turtle
2/8/2017 07:47:46 pm

I remember it was only ever me and my best mate going to computer club, playing some game on the BBC micro where you make cups of tea for a football match and had to make money. Halcyon times.

Then I got my amazing Amstrad and didn't have to go to computer club no more!

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Grand Knee
2/8/2017 08:58:00 pm

Massive love for the Granny's Garden shout out. What a game. Up there with Flowers of Crystal. And, to a slightly lesser extent, Fletcher's Castle.

And yes, Turtles were great too! Why don't they still exist?!? Someone should Kickstarter it.

> PEN DOWN, homeys!!!!! !! Peace out!!!!!! !!!!!

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Kendall9000
2/8/2017 09:50:34 pm

Is it wrong of me to feel a strange twinge of arousal at the sight of Chuckie Egg on a Beeb?

The main thing I remember from computer club was that one little bastard who always managed to get there first and hog the BBC Master with a colour screen. The rest of us had to slum it on a BBC B and play our colourful games in green phosphor monochome. It made a snooker game a bit of a challenge - try to figure out which exact shade of sickly green was the the blue rather than the pink.

Then there was all the mysterious junk piled up in the computer room cupboard that nobody was ever allowed to touch. There was definitely at least one of those Turtle robot things, a camcorder and video digitiser, along with a complete Domesday Project Laserdisc system.

I found out later that kids from my school had contributed content to the Domesday discs a few years earlier. That crowdsourced multimedia project may have been ahead of its time, but by about 1989 or so it had all been tossed aside and forgotten at my school.

My guess is that there'd been a real computer enthusiast on staff at one point - someone who'd convinced the higher-ups that all that nifty gear was needed for the "children's future". By my time he/she had buggered off and left us with teachers who could barely turn a computer on.

All that gear would probably have been as mysterious to the teachers as it was to us, but of course it was too expensive to actually let us play with it, so probably £5000+ of stuff was left to rot.

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Starbuck
3/8/2017 07:58:35 am

K9k, I know what you mean about Chuckie Egg on the Beeb - it's the feel and sound of the keys that does it for me!

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Tomston
2/8/2017 11:28:26 pm

Bloody hell, I have been trying to remember a game from my primary school days forever and Granny's Garden might just be it. Thanks Biffston!

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duckorange
3/8/2017 08:17:51 am

A standard day at our School Computer Club
The Kids: "Can we have the key to the computer room?"
Teacher: "No"
I'm sure he was hiding 8-bit porno on those cassette tapes.

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Cc
3/8/2017 06:10:26 pm

Always love your crazy lists of crazy. Thank you, Mr B.

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