I grew up using these throughout high school in the mid-to-late 80's. They were the perfect machine for a budding hacker because they were very close to a real UNIX system without actually being well-designed. They had networking. They had a very primitive speech synthesizer chip or subsystem of some kind - I had no documentation for it, but there were a handful of samples that said fixed words and so I was able to chop up the sample utterances and make it say other things to some degree. You could redirect these requests over the network and make other people's machines speak during class. There was a basic inode-type file system but it had weird permissions and was pretty closely mapped to the physical disk topology so you could edit directories and reassign file locations to be the locations of other files, like, say, the password file. There wasn't anything to stop you from writing a fake login prompt to capture passwords from the unsuspecting. They had structured pascal, a decent LOGO interpreter and a C compiler so they could support really any sort of sophisticated program that a high school student of the day could write.

It's sad they ordered them all destroyed. While they were obsolete the day they were made it would be great for there to be a working installation of them to show off how advanced Ontario was once upon a time.

Yes yes yes!!! I had these in elementary school in Northern Ontario. The blog doesn't mention it but it also had multiplayer games. I remember a few..

- a horse race game where people raced horses by answering math questions

- a fishing game where your boat went across the top of the water and you had to catch fish and lobster without snagging your line

- a typing game that did not check if you typed the correct words or all the words, and would just calculate "number of words entered / time you took", so if you started a typing test and hit a letter and then escape, it would give you a ridiculous WPM score

It's wild to think that this entire system was only for such a small segment of the population, that we'd have our own computer line. What a weird time, the 1980s

I remember this as a huge political pork barrel project. The province gave grants to boards to buy these dogs, yep woof, woof, woof. The lack of programs and support/training and the huge fail rate meant these were soon relegated to storage, where a few techs/hackers kept some running with parts for others. They fell far behind Apple/IBM, commodore, radio shack etc. It was such a huge embarrassment that the government ordered their destruction = closed off and possible resale resource(in truth it was not worth keeping even for that) Burroughs POV was that data was valuable, so detailed circuits etc were denied. Want it fixed? Send it here, here are our rates $$$

I worked briefly for a Toronto company named Trigon that had a government contract in 1984 to produce interconnected office software (word processor, spreadsheet, calendar) for the Icon. The product was called "Emerald". I don't think the Icon hardware existed yet, we developed on Unix. As far as I know, the company went broke before the product was delivered.

> you probably remember the ICON as a cool looking steel monstrosity that had an indestructible keyboard and trackball (which everyone tried to spin as fast as they could)

This is roughly my memory. I had forgotten about these entirely and now I'm racking my brain trying to remember how we used them. I do remember the trackballs, a big computer lab, and only using them on special occasions... I think it must have been around 1989 but I may be off by a year or two

I took typing in HS on these. Sadly the trackballs were almost always worn out or gunked up. The paint program was pretty painful because of it in elementary school.

We didn’t have any programming classes, just a room full of them for typing class, with the server in the closet.

F F F space H H H space. Ugh.

You could wander the menus of the word processor and actually dial the modem. We got endless joy from calling Pizza Pizza and hearing an annoyed voice coming from the closet.

We shared one dot matrix paper and my friend and I just split the odd and even pages and print twice because the teacher would let us listen to our walk/discman when we were finished and I really wanted to listen to The Bends.

So I guess I did learn a bit about programming :).

Anyone play a Oregon Trail type game where you would navigate rivers with the trackball?

The trackball had the advantage over a mouse where you could keep spinning it with force and it felt like endless fun.

Ah, this brings back memories. I took High School computers with these, and I think they inspired me to really get into computers as a profession. We used BASIC and I learned an actual second language -- Pascal.

Our teachers were pretty novice, and as admins ... um, not really. All the teachers signed in as the superuser (I guess it was root?) to do anything, and they'd often just walk away, leaving us a superuser shell. Fun times. A friend in that class would create superuser accounts, but they find them and delete them. If I remember correctly, there wasn't a RTC backup, so turning the system off meant you had to set the date; and they would only power on the lab when there were students there. So they had this clever script that would run on superuser login that would set the time. So I wrote a little addition that would create a SUID-like shell in some obscure part of the system, so we could have the superuser privs whenever we wanted. A first hack! :) QNX was fun, and it was a good baseline for learning Unix later in University.

I used these in kindergarten in Ontario in the 90s.

My first computer. I figured out the password on my own so I could play more. It was password!

Only used these for about 2-years in high-school (Picton)

What I remember was the trackball, the multi-player games ... and if you used the equivalent of "NET SEND" to send a message to another terminal to another you could crash the network. Maybe we had an older/non-patched version of the system.

I remember playing Robot R&D on these (a later version I think) in 4th grade. You walked a stick-man robot around. It has 3D wireframe graphics.

Wow this dates me, but lots of typing classes in the 3rd grade on these machines.

another cool education computer: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

Ah yes, the computers of my youth at K-8 primary school. I spent many a computer period playing such fine games as Mathville and Offshore Fishing. Damn you, shark!

I worked for Burroughs from the early 80s; at first on B80s, latterly on B20s.

I never heard of one of these things. I would have been intrigued.

A 186 - the HP Palmtop years later would put basically this entire machine into a device the size of a paperback book.

Oh wow, this and Commodore 64 in the classroom. 'Dungeons and Dragons'. And QNX!

Did it not have a Turing compiler?