…. Again, as most here know my wife is a Middle School science teacher, uses fpv quads in her class.. Another teacher retired, she “inherited” his larger classroom.. Prior to the school year ending several “work orders” were put in to remove / dispose of “outdated” unusable technology “stuff” that was packed into this room… Needless to say, it didn’t get down over the summer.. 
  Another work order was submitted, and my wife started moving “junk” to the dumpster and hallways…30 years of collecting, now being purged… technology textbooks from 1993 and so on filled multiple book cases..
  Found some stuff that will make you laugh .. maybe cringe..
Read the title on the tapes..

… so I decided to “purge” some of my old stuff.. now I always wanted to get into RC as a kid, but it was a rich man’s hobby.. but when I got out of the military and bough my first computer I did buy this …

I think the stuff on Morse Code isn't that outdated. I think kids should be able to understand morse code or at the least those that wish to learn it should be allowed. Morse code is still used in some parts of the military and some offshoots of Ham radio still use it. I think it should be taught as part of a technology course, not so much as a you must be fluent in it, but as an example of a language that is still used on some level today within certain communities.

I also think if you were a technology teacher, you could teach a sub course on computer archaeology, showing the evolution of the desktop from DOS to Windows, through the various incarnations, maybe setup in read only VM's, so that students can get hands on with them and see what it was like to use them. I still remember using msdos to run Wordperfect and playing games like doom, then the place I worked at gave me a copy of Windows 3.1, all on floppy disks. Good times and simpler times in many ways. Mobile phones hadn't deviated the world back then.

We had a run of a few years working as a subcontractor for a company that sold mostly to government entities and schools was the majority of that work. Most of it was projectors but also involved TVs, audio and other things. It was long enough ago that it was around the transition into flat panel TVs but still early enough to hang some CRT TVs too. Most of it was for common area things or auditorium so it didn't seem as wasteful.

Now putting projectors in classrooms was a little overkill for some places considering how costly, plus the eventual bulb costs. But the most overkill was the "Smart" boards, the company I worked for wasn't a distributor of that brand so they sold one made by Hitachi, can't recall their name for it. While I'm sure some teachers did a good job of integrating it maybe a math class or something I'm sure it was wasted on most. Meanwhile a $200 overhead projector that eats $15 bulbs was too antiquated I guess.

A school my sister taught at had those smart boards. I can understand them in a university or college, but a secondary school is overkill. But this same school also assigned a laptop to every child. They picked them up in the morning and returned them at the end of the day.

I think the most wasteful was a place I worked at that had a plethora of large format plasma panels littered around the company premises. They used to run stupidly hot to the touch and were obviously bad for power usage, but the company had about 20 of them running 24/7, with all manner of crap displaying on them. The power bill must have been exorbitant.

Besides not being able to find a cassette tape player, I would say those morse code tapes might still be useful for some technology learning. If your wife works with micro-controllers (pis, arduinos, etc) it would be a neat project to have kids program a text to morse code converter using an led/buzzer, then follow-up and have them program one with a sensor to convert the code back to text. For a communication protocol that was invented in the 1830s, it did get a lot of use throughout history and could probably find lots of historical moments where it was used, and I think there is still some naval use today.

All responses are true.. yes it would be cool to do all those things… you have to realize the attention span of kids today is “0” compared to past students.. and time, is a commodity.
It’s funny.. she has a display she made, it has the progression of “computer storage”(5.25,4”, CD,thumb drive, cloud) on her wall..
Using a lot of old stuff would be like giving a “keyboarding” class using actual typewriters (no correction).. it would be a fun experiment .. but totally impractical..
When I found that sim floppy i was like ..”wow, let me see what it looks like”.. then I realized.. I don’t have a floppy drive.. hell, most computers don’t even have optical drives..
She did find some “rotary phones” she will keep.. I’ve watched some videos on kids trying to use them.. it’s a little entertaining..

With things like Scratch, it makes it a little easier for kids to understand programming logic without having to learn the syntax. And also they get instant on-screen feedback/gratification which seems is a requirement these days. We did some sessions with some middle school students teaching them how to build/program a line following robot. None of the kids had any programming experience and for most it was their first semester using a computer (a Waldorf school). It started out with them using Scratch to animate a virtual robot to do this task on screen, and then they took their own code and loaded it to an arduino bot they built.
It was a pretty small group of around 12 students, I would say 2 of them really understand it and were off creating/programming their own code to do new things. Probably another 4 had a pretty good handle and could do some simple debugging on their own and even help others. The rest of the students had to wait for the step-by-step and mostly just followed along with just one or two needing lots of help. But in the end everyone had fun, and it was a blast to have a fleet of robots running around the classroom.

Seems your wife is missing some bits in her display... 1.44" floppy disk, zip drive, punch cards, throw in a cassette tape too....

Pity I didn't live closer, i'd send you a floppy drive. I still have a couple, but only 3.5's. Would love a 5.25, but haven't seen one in a very long time. At one point I even had one of those Iomega drives that used 100mb floppies.

.. I believe she teaches “scratch” or another program ..use mindcraft.., do the “Lego” competition and once built a fpv quad from Legos.. WITHOUT glue..it was pretty cool..

Mstc .. I think it was for temp storage. But funny you mention “punch cards”… her dad used to work for IBM (70s) and she would tell me stories of STACKS of punch cards her dad used to handle….

(22-Jul-2023, 05:32 PM)Pathfinder075 Wrote: Pity I didn't live closer, i'd send you a floppy drive. I still have a couple, but only 3.5's. Would love a 5.25, but haven't seen one in a very long time. At one point I even had one of those Iomega drives that used 100mb floppies.

Zip drives! Man, those things were awesome, and pretty amazing at the time. Short lived, and never really took off. Bad timing on the manufacturers part if I remember correctly- I think it came out shortly before cd-rw drives were available.

That was quite a while ago, my memory could be wrong.

I'm pretty sure I was using a Zip drive before CD burners came out, I had the 100mb version before the 250mb came out.

I remember in the early days of CD burning you almost had to buy a premium drive (Plextor) to get good results. Not to mention burning at 1x speed and you might as well abandon using the PC until it was done. Towards the end you're burning CDs at 52x and beyond 650mb with a $15 drive.

Even with the first DVD burners I think that was a Pioneer. With the early DVDs you needed quality media in the beginning, remember Ricoh being the go to for blank DVDs. Same with CD burners combo CD/DVD burners got real cheap.

I had two. I had an Iomega Zip Drive and an Imation LS120. The LS120 was still working last time I plugged my first PC in and booted it, a couple of years back. Still running Windows 98 SE. But the Y2K bios problem had caused some issues with it.