That teacher would have been Joe Vayda, I seem to remember him from early
TPUG meetings.
-----Original Message-----
From: Leif Bloomquist
Sent: Monday, March 20, 2017 11:38 AM
To: torontocbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Andrew Wilkens
Subject: [torontocbm] Fwd: Pet computers
Hi all,
See the request below, does anyone know about this program?
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andrew Wilkens <ahwilkens@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 12:07 AM
Subject: Pet computers
To: "info@xxxxxxx" <info@xxxxxxx>
Cc: "awilkens@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <awilkens@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Hi I went to Rose avenue public school. In 1978 I, and two others went
and picked up several pet computers for our classroom that year. Our
teacher was Mr. Vayda and my classmate was Carl Reid. We went on to
use the computers in class for the full year, (grade 6) in depth using
basic language (print, quote) and bit and bytes and possibly other
stuff (i am a bit old to remember it).
We should stay late almost every day (7-8 pm after school, which was
unusual behaviour for our parents to see at the time), creating new
programs and finding out what the computers could do. It took some
time for video games to be brought to us (in tape cassette form) in
the classroom, each uploaded manually! It was an exciting period and
the time we spent developing programs and testing limits for the
computers was interesting for a 10 year old. I wrote math and language
programs for the fourth grade among numerous other programs. We were
featured on a popular Canadian TV show at the time as well.
Do you know of any information about this classroom or the test use of
these computers? Was it a Toronto wide program or just a focused trial
on a few schools?
I worked with another child/friend that joined us by the name of
Dylan. We hosted an introduction show or venue at one of the bank
buildings in downtown in Toronto. I assume it was a marketing scenario
on behalf of Commodore, but it was vey exciting for us as young
children to be considered little whizzes on these machines. I have
waited to find an old pet to experiment on but I have not seen one
since the sixth grade in 1978.
Any information on this would be of interest.
Sincerely
Andrew Wilkens
