It was always a myth, anyway. There were always girls who played arcade games, as well as boys who thought they were stupid. But, girls would often simply just let their crushes/boyfriends play so that we could pretend to be impressed.
I ruled the 7-11 Galaga machine across from my high school. :P
Oh, programming? A lot of girls just don't like math, and you used to have to have a really good math average to get into the computer science class in the 80s.
When I was in high school in the late 2000s, one of our math teachers (a woman, by the way) taught the class. She was probably the only teacher to ever teach the class - when she started, they didn't actually have a single computer in the school. Instead, they had time on a mainframe and they somehow entered programs over the phone.
I find it cute how you phrase it like it was magic. They probably had a terminal, smart or dumb, with a modem. (As in an actual make-screechy-noises-into-a-phone-line modem, not a cable modem.) If you recall what a DOS prompt is, imagine one of those except the commands are being run on another machine instead of yours because your machine isn't a computer, it's just a screen, keyboard, and a connection to the phone network. In modern parlance, the thinnest possible thin client.
If it was really vintage the terminal had no screen, just an electromechanical teletype. Instead of printing to a traditional printer on the other end, the TTY would print to a punched-card printer, then some person on the other end set up and fed the punched cards into the mainframe, taking the output cards and feeding them back into a device that read the cards and sent the output back to the teletype in the school. From the students' point of view it'd be like typing a program on a typewriter and then an hour or day later the typewriter prints the result of the program by itself.
Fun IT fact: The Canada Revenue Agency still uses an ancient mainframe/terminal setup to manage the tax system. CRA agents who think they're smart call the program used to access that a "DOS program" but it's actually a terminal emulator. A Windows 7 or 10 computer being used to emulate what's effectively a typewriter with a monitor attached from the 1970's or 1980's.
(None of them know why the program references F13 through F24 to refer to shift-F1 through shift-F12, not even the ones who think they're smart.)
Fun IT fact: The Canada Revenue Agency still uses an ancient mainframe/terminal setup to manage the tax system. CRA agents who think they're smart call the program used to access that a "DOS program" but it's actually a terminal emulator. A Windows 7 or 10 computer being used to emulate what's effectively a typewriter with a monitor attached from the 1970's or 1980's.
(None of them know why the program references F13 through F24 to refer to shift-F1 through shift-F12, not even the ones who think they're smart.)
Oh god, at what point do we reach 40k levels of "were not quite sure how it works anymore, only that it does and that we need to appease its machine spirit with burning incense and mono-script chanting?"
I know about phone modems, but I wasn't sure how it worked without a microcomputer (as they were called at the time). I had no idea about the teletype.
It's funny how they get mad about this, but any man getting involved in things dominated by women is the enemy.
Fuck off back to your shitty little cult hobbies.
The only fix is to be unapologetic about throwing women out of our hobbies and clubhouses.
Gatekeeping and swift exclusion for those who try to change the way things work.
It's almost as if maintaining traditions is important or something.
Not all traditions.
It was always a myth, anyway. There were always girls who played arcade games, as well as boys who thought they were stupid. But, girls would often simply just let their crushes/boyfriends play so that we could pretend to be impressed.
I ruled the 7-11 Galaga machine across from my high school. :P
Oh, programming? A lot of girls just don't like math, and you used to have to have a really good math average to get into the computer science class in the 80s.
When I was in high school in the late 2000s, one of our math teachers (a woman, by the way) taught the class. She was probably the only teacher to ever teach the class - when she started, they didn't actually have a single computer in the school. Instead, they had time on a mainframe and they somehow entered programs over the phone.
I find it cute how you phrase it like it was magic. They probably had a terminal, smart or dumb, with a modem. (As in an actual make-screechy-noises-into-a-phone-line modem, not a cable modem.) If you recall what a DOS prompt is, imagine one of those except the commands are being run on another machine instead of yours because your machine isn't a computer, it's just a screen, keyboard, and a connection to the phone network. In modern parlance, the thinnest possible thin client.
If it was really vintage the terminal had no screen, just an electromechanical teletype. Instead of printing to a traditional printer on the other end, the TTY would print to a punched-card printer, then some person on the other end set up and fed the punched cards into the mainframe, taking the output cards and feeding them back into a device that read the cards and sent the output back to the teletype in the school. From the students' point of view it'd be like typing a program on a typewriter and then an hour or day later the typewriter prints the result of the program by itself.
Fun IT fact: The Canada Revenue Agency still uses an ancient mainframe/terminal setup to manage the tax system. CRA agents who think they're smart call the program used to access that a "DOS program" but it's actually a terminal emulator. A Windows 7 or 10 computer being used to emulate what's effectively a typewriter with a monitor attached from the 1970's or 1980's.
(None of them know why the program references F13 through F24 to refer to shift-F1 through shift-F12, not even the ones who think they're smart.)
Oh god, at what point do we reach 40k levels of "were not quite sure how it works anymore, only that it does and that we need to appease its machine spirit with burning incense and mono-script chanting?"
I know about phone modems, but I wasn't sure how it worked without a microcomputer (as they were called at the time). I had no idea about the teletype.
They don't need to be playing them to ruin them. That's the problem.