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Do you remember film projectors in class?

  • Oh god, I'm old

    Votes: 209 56.2%
  • I was that kid who knew how to use it

    Votes: 22 5.9%
  • ok boomer

    Votes: 141 37.9%

  • Total voters
    372

Deleted member 49611

Nov 14, 2018
5,052
No, but they used these things:


Benefits-and-Drawbacks-of-overhead-projectors-topbestreviewss.com_.jpg
that was my physics class. my teacher loved his projector.
 

Persephone

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,481
ngl thought this was gonna be about overhead projectors

mercatos.i16470268.1.Nobo-Quantum-Overhead-Projector-2521


when we first started getting smartboards they blew my tiny mind
 

Bakercat

Member
Oct 27, 2017
10,154
'merica
No, but they used these things:


Benefits-and-Drawbacks-of-overhead-projectors-topbestreviewss.com_.jpg
Yup, and by the time I got in high school they moved to those overhead projectors. So many clear plastics and markers being used in my childhood lol. My professor and advisor in my graduate program still uses this instead of PowerPoint too lol.

I also remember the old crt tv on a cart they would roll in to watch a vhs/dvd show on with edutainment or movie day.
 

bionic77

Member
Oct 25, 2017
30,898
Earlier today I saw a meme about the teacher rolling the TV cart into class because they didn't want to teach that day, and I thought how that's such a Millennial/Gen-Z thing. When I was in primary school in the '80s they rolled this beast into the room:

4rRrh19.jpg


Most of the teachers had no clue how to thread it, so they'd ask who knew how to, and multiple hands would go up, because some of us closely watched the teacher who did know how to use it. Most of the time around here when the reels started rolling we were greeted by this creepy dude:

3j8b14l.gif


Bonus points if you remember this cursed object, and the cassette tapes that narrated along side it and gave the tone to advance frame:

E9WMxcZ.jpg
I remember all of those...

VHS was such a huge step up and I remember seeing some super boring history laserdisc and being absolutely blown away by the technology.

CDs, laserdiscs, minidiscs, pretty much anything digital back then was kind of mind blowing when you started from overhead projectors etc.

I am old as fuck. I remember they had an old mimeograph machine when the photocopier (which was treated like something very precious) was not working or I guess for the teachers that didn't have the privilege of using it.
 
OP
OP
lunarworks

lunarworks

Member
Oct 25, 2017
22,275
Toronto
I am old as fuck. I remember they had an old mimeograph machine when the photocopier (which was treated like something very precious) was not working or I guess for the teachers that didn't have the privilege of using it.
The mimeograph was such an odd machine. It used this stinky alcohol mixture to make the copies. I think they'd phased that out by grade 3 in my school.
 

amon37

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,011
You had laserdisc? What school did you go to lol.
We had 8mm garbage films from the 60s and 70s in my health class then "upgraded" to VHS in my high school in the early 90s. Public school ftw.

Public school also. I do remember watching a couple movies and there was a laserdisc player. It wasn't often, the school probably only had one
 

NCR Ranger

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,894
Only for large all school assemblies in elementary. For the classroom the closest we had were the overhead projectors. Besides that it was the good old TV/VCR cart that the teacher spent 5 to 10 minutes plugging it up and getting to work. That was the real mystery. It is just a TV and VCR why was it getting unplugged from the TV all the time?
 
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Stencil

Member
Oct 30, 2017
10,427
USA
Only the real old teachers used them, like our health teacher. Otherwise it was all VHS. One music teacher had a laserdisc.
 

DarthWoo

Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,673
They didn't really use the first one as much unless they were showing a film at an assembly in the gym or something.

The second one I recall every week in sixth grade, we'd get a current events quiz with a filmstrip that was delivered regularly. We got a sticker if we got an answer right first and could trade them in for silly prizes that the teacher had bought.
 

robot

Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,474
Born in '88. I never saw a reel-to-reel or slide projector, but we had overhead projectors and CRTs in every classroom. Occasionally you'd see a laserdisk but it was mostly VHS.
 

FnordChan

Avenger
Oct 26, 2017
769
Beautiful Chapel Hill, NC
I'm lucky enough to be local to the A/V Geeks, Skip Elsheimer's ongoing project to preserve and present educational films from the classroom projector era. In addition to selling compilations and providing local presentations, you can watch a huge amount of material on their YouTube channel. Here's a particularly magnificent example:

Shake Hands With Danger (1980) - The country music craze zeitgeist combines with heavy equipment training and a festival of bloody mayhem. Long at 24 minutes but well worth watching the first couple of minutes so you can appreciate the immortal theme song.

And, while not on their channel per se, here's another classic:

Telezonia (1974) - Ma Bell sends a group of children on a musical adventure into the exciting world of the telephone! This is another long one that requires editing to get to the good parts, so the link here jumps ahead to the sing-a-long masterpiece "Pick Up The Phone As Soon As It Rings", which will be stuck in your head forever. It's nostalgic to look back at a time when you could encourage someone to simply answer their goddamned phone and not assume it's a scam of some sort. Or, at least, not as often. That said, the whole thing is a magical journey back to the mid-70s; I particularly liked an earlier segment where their tour guide enthuses wildly about the sweet color options available like Avacado Green for your super hip Trimline phone.

Having powered through a bunch of these sorts of films I can't say they're generally all that great - better than listening to your teacher drone on, for sure, but often kinda a snooze in and of themselves - but as time capsules they absolutely cannot be beat.
 
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OP
OP
lunarworks

lunarworks

Member
Oct 25, 2017
22,275
Toronto
Telezonia 1974 - Ma Bell sends a group of children on a musical adventure into the exciting world of the telephone! This is another long one that requires editing to get to the good parts, so the link here jumps ahead to the sing-a-long masterpiece "Pick Up The Phone As Soon As It Rings", which will be stuck in your head forever. It's nostalgic to look back at a time when you could encourage someone to simply answer their goddamned phone and not assume it's a scam of some sort. Or, at least, not as often. That said, the whole thing is a magical journey back to the mid-70s; I particularly liked an earlier segment where their tour guide enthuses wildly about the sweet color options available like Avacado Green for your super hip Trimline phone.
Call the FBI. We found Q, guys.

kk9fIUSl.png
 

Damaniel

The Fallen
Oct 27, 2017
6,542
Portland, OR
At my schools, it was a mix of projectors and VHS, but the former was far more common through my elementary and middle school years, and video was more common after that. For reference, I graduated from high school in 1997.
 

Crispy75

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,058
We had one at primary school which was used to show one of a handful of 16mm prints of kids movies at christmas. IIRC it was either Annie, Herbie and Bedknobs & Broomsticks. This would have been early/mid 80s
 

balohna

Member
Nov 1, 2017
4,210
We only had the CRT/VCR combo. Even when it was 100 kids sitting on the gym floor watching something, that same 30" TV was what we got.

I'm 33. We also had Apple II GS's for my first few years of school. I remember we got PCs with Windows 95 and it was a big deal. I was in grade 3 then, so that would have been 96 or 97. Just looked it up and that would mean the Apple computers we were using up to that point were a 10 year old model. Damn. My school was K-7 and by the time I was out of there 4 years later they still had those same Windows 95 PCs. Playing basketball at other wealthier schools I couldn't help notice they had computer labs full of iMacs.

My high school had CRTs mounted in every class room and throughout the hallways, and they could receive broadcasts from inside the school. Felt high tech in the early 2000s. We also had one higher end computer lab that was used for drafting and 3D animation, and those PCs had flat screen CRT monitors. Most classrooms had one PC in the corner that seemed ancient and would take like 5 minutes to load a web page. The OS at that school was definitely Windows NT, which I think is like 98 (or 2000?) but specifically made for internal networks like schools and offices?

Oh and just realized OP mentions the CFB too. We were watching ancient Canada Film Board VHS tapes all the way through my schooling. A huge portion of any educational material we watched had to have been from the 80s, if not the 70s. Newest thing we'd see in class was Bill Nye episodes, which were also pushing 10 years old by that point.
 
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SpecX

The Fallen
Oct 30, 2017
1,822
No, but they used these things:


Benefits-and-Drawbacks-of-overhead-projectors-topbestreviewss.com_.jpg

This is what we used forever in middle and high school. I did have 1 teacher in high school use a projector with slides vs this. He loved trashing how old and old school the other teachers were compared to him. My best teacher in high school and honestly the reason I improved my grades.

I won't forget how he kept on top of every student with their grades in his class and he went through the effort of getting all your grades from the other teachers since he knew his co-workers were lazy and didn't put in the effort. He put in the extra time to get students help in other classes as well as helped bridge communication with other teachers that were known to be difficult.

Can't forget the rest of the gang




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These are the 2 I remember. Now that I think back, I'm surprised some of our teachers allowed students to pick up the tv and bring them to class from the library.

That pencil sharpener brings back memories. I still have the scar on the palm of my hand from 4th grade. I sharpened the fuck out of my pencil, walked back to my desk, and had no idea why my desk and paper was bloody. Looked down and saw I stabbed my hand and broke the tip of the pencil in there.
 

Coinspinner

Member
Nov 6, 2017
2,154
We sometimes had old projectors (which we thought of as old), slides, and also VHS. In my final years we watched early Southpark on DVD but actual teaching materials lagged behind.
 

MegaRockEXE

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 29, 2017
3,964
No, we did not use literal museum artifacts in classrooms in suburban SoCal in the late 90s.
Oldest tech regularly used were the overhead projectors with the transparency sheets and markers.
 

Reinhard

Member
Oct 27, 2017
6,625
I only remember VHS and of course overhead projectors/slide projector for still images. Maybe there was reels too since it was the 1980s but I don't remember them other than rare movie screening in the auditorium.
 
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TAJ

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
12,446
When I started school they had film projectors, but 16mm not 8mm. This was in 1981.
They had some movies and cartoon shorts that they would show on the projector in the cafeteria/auditorium on rainy days and more projectors on carts for showing documentaries in classrooms.
They got TV/VCR carts when I was in third grade, but they still used the projectors because they didn't have everything on VHS yet.
Later on my brand-new high school was still using overhead projectors, but not film projectors.
 
Oct 27, 2017
1,139
Never in class, we had TV's there.
But every couple of months there was a special movie evening event. They converted the canteen into a movie theatre and showed a somewhat recent movie.