R-The day the internet came to school
Reading multiple choice task. Read the text below and answer the questions below.
The day the internet came to school
The internet is a fantastic resource and it is hard to imagine a time when people learned new information without it. The internet has gone through many evolutions since its earliest days. Back at the beginning, the only thing you could see online was a black screen with a few white words on it.
I hadn’t even really heard about the internet before I went online. We were given a series of commands to type into the computer and, after a lot of failed attempts, our teacher explained what had just happened – we were online! It seemed so exciting and new that I told all my friends and family about it, even though I had no intention of wasting another entire afternoon trying to get online again. Back then, there were very few websites around, and you needed the exact web address to get onto them. The important thing, though, was that the internet age had arrived.
I started university in 1988, when there were only a couple of computer laboratories and a few individual machines around the university campus. The small numbers were never a problem because nobody knew how to use them. The few people who did had computers in their rooms anyway. A university professor had to teach us how to use computer code and the steps to get onto the few sites available, a process that took over six weeks to complete. It was a real effort.
After about ten minutes of typing in one black screen we got to another identical black screen, but we were told it was the ‘University of Cambridge Library Web Site’. We could type the name of a book and the website would tell us if they had it in the library. We weren’t able to borrow the book, because we were studying at a university many miles away. We could just confirm that it was there. Still, it felt modern to say ‘I’ve been online’.
Fast forward ten years and things had come a long way. I was the owner of a 1.6kg ‘baby’, which seemed light at the time – my own laptop, or ‘hand-held computer’ as it was called in those days. It cost me a month’s wages to buy, and another half a month’s wages in repairs and maintenance several times in the first year. I decided it had to go because of that. But for one wonderful year, I could switch it on and be online in under ten minutes, a huge bonus back then.
At that time, I was working on a project that introduced computers in every school, phoning headteachers to make sure everything was going well. One enthusiastic man answered the phone ‘Why, yes, our computer has arrived and we’re very excited,’ he said. ‘Great! I’ll send you some attachments, then.’ I offered, secretly pleased because I had just learned to do attachments that week. ‘Ah, for that, I think, we’ll need the school to have electricity, too,’ he replied. I hadn’t even considered checking that.