Hill Street Views: A short history of local ground-breaking technology

While flicking through Facebook and then popping over to check the latest news on Twitter, I then decided to take a look at my emails next. I opened a word document from work and also mindlessly scrolled through Instagram moments later – all this in less than a minute, while sitting on the couch at home last weekend.

During this digital time-wasting I happened upon a video on YouTube. It was a sound-tracked eight-minute run-through of a computer game which I had not thought of, nor seen, in almost thirty years.

And I remember exactly where I was when I last clapped eyes on it. Second class in CBS school in October 1991.

This was in Mr Tom Kindlon’s class, who, after having had three female teachers from the start of school – Ms McKeever, Ms Duffy and Ms Jennings, respectively – became my first ever male teacher.

Mr Kindlon was a dab hand at playing the guitar, among other things, and would regularly serenade us with tunes that were probably quite well-known in his day, but for a class of nearly 30 eight-year-old boys they failed somewhat to spark much drive towards a lifetime in the musical arts.

Still, whenever Mr Kindlon went over to the back of the cófraí and pulled out the six-stringer, we knew that we had at least 20 minutes of not having to worry about times tables or spelling.

But, back but to Granny’s Garden. This game, which was built into a unwieldy, beige coloured computer which stood about four feet tall on a trolley that was rolled into the classroom once a week, was something new and unknown to us inquisitive young boys.

I can clearly remember the head-scratching and bamboozled look on my classmates’ faces as this beast of ‘new technology’ was wheeled in that first day in October 1991. We approached it in a similar manner to the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey as they tentatively touched the alien black monolith which would instil in them the gift of sentience at the very start of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi classic.

Simply put, we had no idea what this thing was. It looked like a telly, but sadly didn’t have any cartoons or films on it.

In groups of four, we would be brought up to the top of the class, just off to the left of the blackboard, and would sit down and play Granny’s Garden. This very crude 8-bit game was a text-based, educational adventure game – it looked like Teletext on your TV, but with even more limited square graphics than you’d have hoped for.

Still, the game enthralled us with its strange colours set against a black backdrop. Ultimately each group of classmates had to complete the game – which took many weeks and not a little prompting and cajoling from Mr Kindlon, to get us over the line.

His patience in this regard was remarkable. I’ll always remember that about Mr Kindlon – he really kept the cool, despite plenty of the groups simply giving up when presented with another seemingly impossible question to answer before they could progress to the next part of Granny’s Garden.

Mr Kindlon would eventually leave CBS after many years and become the headmaster of Stonetown National School near Louth Village.

He passed away just over six years ago – at a relatively young age, sadly.

It was in his class that I first experienced using a computer – something we all take for granted now, and something we use nearly every minute we’re awake.

Despite all the other important subjects we would learn then and into the future, this first use of a computer would turn out to be one of the more important moments in our formative education.

Another man who was no stranger to technology, and in fact, led the way with mobile phones locally (in my mind anyway), was another teacher from CBS – Mr Billy Shaw, the school’s principal when I attended.

Mr Shaw was an incredibly energetic man. My abiding memory, or snapshot of him, is a figure of constant motion. I can see him only as a blur; moving from classroom to classroom down the corridor, dispensing some important message in the ear of the teacher and abruptly departing.

Mr Shaw also had – I could be wrong – the very first mobile phone in human history. As he bounced down the corridor, always in his right hand was a very large, coffee-coloured phone with an extendable aerial dangerously protruding from the top of it.

This phone was, I believe, linked to the landline in the secretary’s office and whenever the secretary needed to get put an outside call through to the permanently in motion Mr Shaw, she simply connected it through to the brick-sized phone held tightly in his fist.

Upon receiving the call, the ringtone sounded akin to a foghorn warning of impending nuclear oblivion.

Mr Shaw would delicately extend the aerial and take the call - which almost always dropped or sounded distorted, requiring a finger in one ear and a shout of
‘What?’ as he legged it back to the office.

Alas, this was my first impression of what would become the norm for all of us just a few years later.

It was another first for education at my alma mater.

While technology advanced at a ferocious pace in CBS, there’s one special memory I hold dear – the smell of fresh new books and copybooks bought from the school shop across the corridor from Mr Shaw’s office. You can have your new-fangled Granny’s Garden PC game and your telescopic brick phones – I’ll take a book any day!

It’s that scent of freshly bound paper that gets me to this day.

I am instantly transported back to primary school whenever I leaf through a new tome in a book shop today. Pure bliss.

There would be other educational computer games we would play over the years of primary school, but the quality never really made a quantum leap forward though.

There was one, which I think was strangely titled Puff the Magic Dragon, which is both weird and probably inappropriate for kids, given its alternate 1970s drugs reference.

But it was the same type of game as Granny’s Garden, just in different clothing really.
Really, it would not be until the mid-1990s that I can recall home/school computing evolving to another level. In the years after Granny’s Garden, there would be Amstrad computers also. Our next door neighbour had one and the thrill of nearly destroying a joystick as we played an Olympic’s style sports game raises a smile.

Our neighbour also had cassette tape Robocop and Batman games - which blew my mind. It took 30 minutes to load the tape into the computer, but it was worth it as we savoured the clunky square-headed Batman figure jumping awkwardly from rooftop to rooftop (at least I think they were rooftops – was never too sure).

Between having mandated weekly computer classes in Coláiste Rís and my dad buying a Gateway 2000 home PC, the next step opened me to the world of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.

These operating systems ensured that text-based systems were almost made redundant overnight.

Although the dark, black and white world of MS-DOS was still used to load some computer games for a couple of more years.

It was around this time too that dial-up internet made its first, slow and noisy appearance.

At home, whenever you needed to use the internet, the landline was temporarily out of action. It became a squeal of howling beeps and whirls until you had finished checking your Yahoo emails.

The pace of change has been astounding within my generation. Even in college, in the early 2000s, we still had a class called Databasing – which I hated. It was a rudimentary exercise in linking up data between different sections – I think.

Even more remarkably, we were still using floppy disks to back things up then! Zip disks and CDs arrived to great acclaim a year or two later.

They lasted about five years, before the cloud took over.

And today? I’m still sitting on the couch, watching viral videos and chuckling at memes on Twitter – isn’t technology wonderful?