My husband Otello Meucci worked for Borg-Warner when this System80 was being developed. Dr Lola May was used as the math consultant, BF Skinner for the positive reinforcement aspects of the programs. Tello became a regional sales manager for Philadelphia PA, DE, DC, parts of MD, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. It was a great teaching machine. We had one in Newark DE Elementary Special Ed class when I 10:16 was a teacher’s aide. Thanks for posting your demo video and your years of teaching!
I took on the sales manager role for Borg-Warner System80 in Utah, Montana and parts of Idaho and Nevada right out of college in 1975. It was the most satisfying job I've had, especially the successes I saw in special education. In the late '70s the company began offering a line of switches to help physically handicapped children interface with the machine. I had an installation of equipment at a special ed school in Kalispell, MT. There was an 8-year-old girl with such sever cerebral palsy that she pretty much just sat in the back of the classroom and watched. Her teachers told me she would get visibly excited when the other kids used System 80, but she didn't have the motor skills to work the machine. She could move her head with some control, though, so we rigged up a switching device that allowed her to activate the buttons with head motions when a light came on under the correct answer. It took all summer to administer just the pretests for the reading program, but in the end the tests indicated that she was capable of reading at a 5th grade level -- at the start, her teachers didn't think she could read at all.
As the mother of a special-needs daughter, I thank you for the lengths to which you went to accommodate this little girl's needs. It's not often that such efforts were made, back then, to devise and build disability features on most educational aids, especially for severely disabled individuals. Imagine this poor girl's quiet frustrations, and the doors you opened for her..... and for her parents.
My Father, who just passed away, worked for Borg-Warner in Mount Prospect, IL making these and moved up through the company until Jostens bought the division of the company and sold off everything shutting it down. My Father loved that job and the people and the System80 product so much. He stood behind it and believed in the product. It makes me proud reading these comments knowing my Father had a small part in helping you educate yourselves. I found my Father kept a box that has a couple of filmstrips, student progress check cards, articles about the inner workings of the System80, some photos of the factory and coworkers, even a 4 color separation ad from it. I remember we always had a System80 at home growing up. One of his last duties at the company was to donate all the last boxes of records and filmstrips to a school. Thank you everyone for the stories and comments and putting a smile on my face today.
I have tried to find a reference to this machine ever since the advent of the internet. I used it in 75-76 in 5th and 6th grade in Ohio to learn French. I discovered that you could hack the machine by pulling (or pushing) the slide until you could see the next (or previous) slide and find which button had the "repeat" designation. From that, you could deduce the correct answer for the current slide. That method always gave me the correct answer! I shared this info with a few select classmates. I learned very little French, but laid the foundation for a lifelong interest in hacking.
My school had these machines, I remember it was a treat to get to resource center to use the System 80 machine. I think I was in 1st grade. I remember the buttons on the front
I remember we had these too in the mid 80s at our school. The records on those had these strange box like things sprinkled throughout the grooves which I think allowed more than one track for a particular answer to be played (allowing the needle to move to alternate tracks). Our machine might have been a later model with more features.
Thanks for making this - I found some photos of one of these in use in the DC Public School system in '68 in a local history collection I work with and was curious to know how it worked.
Brings me right back to the early 1980s when I was in 1st/2nd grade. I remember it gave me so much anxiety when I got the wrong answers and tried to stop the learning games by pulling out the cartridge
Anything to not have to write stuff in a boring old workbook was a treat. Kids these days have Chromebooks? We looked forward to spending an hour on an Apple ][ each week.
There's a Facebook group for my hometown of Salem, NH, where someone posted this video. I started first grade in 1980 and definitely remember this thing. Jokes were made about using it to hack NORAD and start WW3. 'Want to play a game?'
OMG this is amazing. This is how I learned to read at the age of 3 or 4. My aunt was a nun/teacher and when my mom had something to do, she would drop me off at the convent/school. I would spend my day in the resource center playing with the System 80 machine. This had to be the late 60's early 70's.
I remember using this from remedial school. They would put us in a corner with the computer one at a time, where we would learn one or two strips with the headphones on while the others had free time. I only did the reading lessons as well as the purple ones. Unfortunately, the only thing I know about them is they had a rooster on the starting screen.
I was in 1st grade in 1979 and i used one of these. i wish i could find 1 to buy. i also had work sheets that you put under plastic and you wrote the answer then you just wiped it off. Sure was a lot simpler years ago. We also had an Apple Computer that had a cassette tape machine with it. The cassette was like the cd of today because the cassettes had computer programs and games on them. My 16 yr old daughter thought it was boring. lol
Elementary school for me, back in the early 70s. I hated these machines. The slides were kept in soft plastic binder slips, and every time that plastic smell hits me now, it reminds me of these machines. And the big, bulky headphones we had to wear while using them. 😣 The constant clicking from button selection in the system80 classroom would be enough to drag a swift confession out of a hardened criminal!! 😂
I remember when school equipment screamed "institutional". Big chunky things in avacado green, sickly beige, metal everywhere that looked more at home in a rooftop HVAC system, and the worst wood grain finish you could ever imagine. They were built like tanks, but they should've hired an industrial designer to make those things look the at least slightly bit attractive. Of course this was back in the 1980s, and it looks like schools just use regular off the shelf consumer equipment these days.
I've never seen one of those machine before, but I do remember a similar one that plays 45rpm records and a filmstrip made by Hoffman. But this thing takes the cake.
My grade school had one. Loved this thing! For some reason, I remember it as placing the record on, then putting the needle on the album. This shows that it's been long enough I didn't remember how it really was done! I do remember the slides, and the trick to skipping redundant questions :D
When I was in elementary school, we had one of these machines. After watching this video, I'm not quite sure how I did it, but I managed to make the record do a dragged tone arm scratching sound as I was taking it out of the slot on the top. I think I popped it as it was playing, that's why.
Back between 1985 till about 1987 when I lived in northern California with my grandparents of which we lived there in San Jose from 1982 to September 1993. Anyway between the years 1985 to 1987 I went to Reed elementary and was in a special program called eastfield and they actually had the system 80 machine and I remember using it
I had this machine in my class. I was in the 4th grade. Heard Mixon Elementary School Covington, Georgia. And I cheated, there was something like a thin piece of tissue and if you got it wrong, it would punch the hole. 😂 😂. Teacher was always on to my foolery. Mrs. Grady.
Wow we had these in Van Rensselaer Elementary School!!!! I loved it when it was my turn to get on the system 80 only because i was the last to get on and i would stay on the longest😂
Oh man, the memories... I remember thinking how cool this thing was (despite the anxiety it created.) Now it looks terribly antiquated, of course. On a side note, the math lady is sounding a little Katharine Hepburn-ish now.
This has the typical design of computer equipment from the late 60s to the early 1980s. Imagine when this product was new, and you see this machine that looks like something straight out of "2001: A Space Odyssey" sitting in your classroom. Your mind would be blown. The Newcomb record player and Bell & Howell 16mm movie projector sitting near this device seem hidiously outdated in comparison.
Wow this brings back memories! I remember there being a thin paper that could be attached to the filmslide that would indicate how many of the questions you answered correctly. I believe that was only meant for certain sets in each kit. I remember on those it would say at the end with that shaggy green character "That's it, now take the record and filmslide out and give them to your teacher." Haven't seen one of these for probably nearly 40 years. I believe in the mid 80's, Borg Warner got out of the educational business and a company by the name of Josten's Learning Systems took over manufacturing these machines for a while until they dropped it in favor of selling computer software that did pretty much the same thing. There is still a webpage going by the name, system80.com but I'm not sure who owns it these days.
"Wow this brings back memories! I remember there being a thin paper that could be attached to the filmslide that would indicate how many of the questions you answered correctly" That would mean that the card slot was a punch card maker in addition to a punch reader. I assumed that there was just a bunch of pins inside that would fit through the holes to tell the machine which answer is the correct one but there seems to be more to this?
Ugh - System 80. Our Fairfield County, CT grade school, in the 70s, had a multi-purpose room filled with carrolls and in each one, a System 80 machine. Hated being sent there. But oh how I recognized that droning monotone from the math lady in the first cartridge in the video above. An ice-pick to the ear she was. Funny - the main thing I remembered about the media was some weird little creature that appeared on screen, and there it is, at 9:54.
This is very interesting. I was thinking about this machine because I used it in elementary school back in 1976. I remember seeing an exercise where it would ask me to find a correct pair of words. It's neat how the system is able to tell the correct answers by the holes on the film and advance the stylus only if you are correct. I also remember seeing a similar machine called PAL that had an error counter that advanced every time you hit a wrong button. I don't think the PAL machine had audio, but it had slides with questions similar to the System 80.
Did these machines have companion workbooks? I could have sworn I had a flimsy soft covered horizontaly(panoramic) shaped book. Maybe im thinking of a work book that wasn't associated withh System80 but was around the same era.
There was a bunch of classroom material associated with the machines. They were happy to sell the machines, but really wanted to sell a complete educational system and protocol. I never saw the extra books and materials, but I do remember looking through a teachers catalog when I was in isolation.
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My husband Otello Meucci worked for Borg-Warner when this System80 was being developed. Dr Lola May was used as the math consultant, BF Skinner for the positive reinforcement aspects of the programs. Tello became a regional sales manager for Philadelphia PA, DE, DC, parts of MD, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. It was a great teaching machine. We had one in Newark DE Elementary Special Ed class when I 10:16 was a teacher’s aide.
Thanks for posting your demo video and your years of teaching!
I took on the sales manager role for Borg-Warner System80 in Utah, Montana and parts of Idaho and Nevada right out of college in 1975. It was the most satisfying job I've had, especially the successes I saw in special education. In the late '70s the company began offering a line of switches to help physically handicapped children interface with the machine. I had an installation of equipment at a special ed school in Kalispell, MT. There was an 8-year-old girl with such sever cerebral palsy that she pretty much just sat in the back of the classroom and watched. Her teachers told me she would get visibly excited when the other kids used System 80, but she didn't have the motor skills to work the machine. She could move her head with some control, though, so we rigged up a switching device that allowed her to activate the buttons with head motions when a light came on under the correct answer. It took all summer to administer just the pretests for the reading program, but in the end the tests indicated that she was capable of reading at a 5th grade level -- at the start, her teachers didn't think she could read at all.
As the mother of a special-needs daughter, I thank you for the lengths to which you went to accommodate this little girl's needs. It's not often that such efforts were made, back then, to devise and build disability features on most educational aids, especially for severely disabled individuals. Imagine this poor girl's quiet frustrations, and the doors you opened for her..... and for her parents.
Brian, did you ever work with anyone from the Mount Prospect, Illinois office in the 70’s and 80’s?
I used one of these as a child ! I remember it and loved it !
Me too!
My Father, who just passed away, worked for Borg-Warner in Mount Prospect, IL making these and moved up through the company until Jostens bought the division of the company and sold off everything shutting it down. My Father loved that job and the people and the System80 product so much. He stood behind it and believed in the product.
It makes me proud reading these comments knowing my Father had a small part in helping you educate yourselves.
I found my Father kept a box that has a couple of filmstrips, student progress check cards, articles about the inner workings of the System80, some photos of the factory and coworkers, even a 4 color separation ad from it.
I remember we always had a System80 at home growing up.
One of his last duties at the company was to donate all the last boxes of records and filmstrips to a school.
Thank you everyone for the stories and comments and putting a smile on my face today.
And I do recall that Borg-Warner was a store in Puerto Rico.
Oh man...memories of Kindergarten! Thanks for posting this!
I have tried to find a reference to this machine ever since the advent of the internet. I used it in 75-76 in 5th and 6th grade in Ohio to learn French. I discovered that you could hack the machine by pulling (or pushing) the slide until you could see the next (or previous) slide and find which button had the "repeat" designation. From that, you could deduce the correct answer for the current slide. That method always gave me the correct answer! I shared this info with a few select classmates. I learned very little French, but laid the foundation for a lifelong interest in hacking.
My school had these machines, I remember it was a treat to get to resource center to use the System 80 machine. I think I was in 1st grade. I remember the buttons on the front
we had a couple of these machines in my Elementary School. It seemed so advanced and awesome to use these.
I remember we had these too in the mid 80s at our school.
The records on those had these strange box like things sprinkled throughout the grooves which I think allowed more than one track for a particular answer to be played (allowing the needle to move to alternate tracks). Our machine might have been a later model with more features.
I remember using these in school a long time ago when I was 7.
Memories of 3rd grade in 1979. thank you for posting.
We had one of these in my special ed classroom back in the early 80s I remember using them.
Thanks for making this - I found some photos of one of these in use in the DC Public School system in '68 in a local history collection I work with and was curious to know how it worked.
I loved this as a kid in the 70's.
It's cool to see now.
Yup,
I'm still a kid lol.
Wow. I haven't seen one of these since about 1992 or so when I was in school. Cool flashback!
My high school had a lot of outdated equipment in it at that time. I'm pretty sure the Newcomb record player in one of my classes had vacuum tubes.
I remember using the System 80 when I was in Pre-K! I used big cushioned headphones!
I remember those. I wish I had them now, to use as earmuffs to block out some of the crap adults say nowadays.
I recall using this system beginning in 1st grade (1975) or 2nd grade (1976). Thank you posting this video!
Brings me right back to the early 1980s when I was in 1st/2nd grade. I remember it gave me so much anxiety when I got the wrong answers and tried to stop the learning games by pulling out the cartridge
Used one of these many times during my elementary school years. The days before classroom computers.
Here it is! Thank you for posting this. Funny to think that school time on the System80 was a treat!
Anything to not have to write stuff in a boring old workbook was a treat.
Kids these days have Chromebooks? We looked forward to spending an hour on an Apple ][ each week.
There's a Facebook group for my hometown of Salem, NH, where someone posted this video. I started first grade in 1980 and definitely remember this thing. Jokes were made about using it to hack NORAD and start WW3. 'Want to play a game?'
I remember those from back in the day . Memories
I used it in elementary school back in 1977.
Used this everyday in my elementary school gifted “class” circa 1975-1977 Tell me you have the French Trainer.. i can still hear the song
I remember System 80 and slides for it in the classroom in 1980's
I remember using one of those in the mid-80s in grade school.
Memories from grade school ❤ and it’s a shame kids don’t listen to they’re elders/parents today like we did as children 🙈
OMG this is amazing. This is how I learned to read at the age of 3 or 4. My aunt was a nun/teacher and when my mom had something to do, she would drop me off at the convent/school. I would spend my day in the resource center playing with the System 80 machine. This had to be the late 60's early 70's.
I had one in my first grade class in 1975!
I’ll remember these we had one in my special Ed classroom in the 80s I remember using these
We had one in my Special Ed class too (mid to late 80s). And the little green guy on the screen to tell you to flip the record over (8:30)
Nostalgic. I want one.
I have one and I’d be willing to sell it. I’m in Southern California.
I used a system 80 to help in reading lab in the 70’s
I had one in the mid-70s. It was referred to as the Teaching Machine.
I remember using this from remedial school. They would put us in a corner with the computer one at a time, where we would learn one or two strips with the headphones on while the others had free time.
I only did the reading lessons as well as the purple ones. Unfortunately, the only thing I know about them is they had a rooster on the starting screen.
Absolutely amazing... 😲😲😲👍🏻
Thanks a lot for the video 🌼🌹🌼
I used one in 1974 at school. The lessons were kind of useless but I felt like I was living in the future. I was 8 years old.
Wow...my school had these in the mid-70s.
I remember using this maching in the 1970s.
I remember the system 80
Mary Margaret Campbell had one of these at Creekside Intermediate School
I was in 1st grade in 1979 and i used one of these. i wish i could find 1 to buy. i also had work sheets that you put under plastic and you wrote the answer then you just wiped it off. Sure was a lot simpler years ago. We also had an Apple Computer that had a cassette tape machine with it. The cassette was like the cd of today because the cassettes had computer programs and games on them. My 16 yr old daughter thought it was boring. lol
Hi Dennis, I have one and I’d be willing to sell it. I’m in Southern California.
Elementary school for me, back in the early 70s. I hated these machines. The slides were kept in soft plastic binder slips, and every time that plastic smell hits me now, it reminds me of these machines. And the big, bulky headphones we had to wear while using them. 😣 The constant clicking from button selection in the system80 classroom would be enough to drag a swift confession out of a hardened criminal!! 😂
I remember when school equipment screamed "institutional". Big chunky things in avacado green, sickly beige, metal everywhere that looked more at home in a rooftop HVAC system, and the worst wood grain finish you could ever imagine. They were built like tanks, but they should've hired an industrial designer to make those things look the at least slightly bit attractive.
Of course this was back in the 1980s, and it looks like schools just use regular off the shelf consumer equipment these days.
I've never seen one of those machine before, but I do remember a similar one that plays 45rpm records and a filmstrip made by Hoffman. But this thing takes the cake.
Wow I forgot all about these, they had one at our elementary school first grade
My grade school had one. Loved this thing!
For some reason, I remember it as placing the record on, then putting the needle on the album. This shows that it's been long enough I didn't remember how it really was done!
I do remember the slides, and the trick to skipping redundant questions :D
When I was in elementary school, we had one of these machines. After watching this video, I'm not quite sure how I did it, but I managed to make the record do a dragged tone arm scratching sound as I was taking it out of the slot on the top. I think I popped it as it was playing, that's why.
ty. I remember the long card. I've been looking for proof of this machine for a long time. I thought I imagined it!!!
My grade school used these until 1993 lol
I started using these in 1979 at my elementary school
We had these in grade school. I fully intend to include their use in my defense if I’m ever on trial for something terrible.
Back between 1985 till about 1987 when I lived in northern California with my grandparents of which we lived there in San Jose from 1982 to September 1993. Anyway between the years 1985 to 1987 I went to Reed elementary and was in a special program called eastfield and they actually had the system 80 machine and I remember using it
I remember this in JHS
I had this machine in my class. I was in the 4th grade. Heard Mixon Elementary School Covington, Georgia. And I cheated, there was something like a thin piece of tissue and if you got it wrong, it would punch the hole. 😂 😂. Teacher was always on to my foolery. Mrs. Grady.
Wow we had these in Van Rensselaer Elementary School!!!! I loved it when it was my turn to get on the system 80 only because i was the last to get on and i would stay on the longest😂
We had these in my elementary school in South Dakota in the early 80's. I had always thought 80 meant 1980 but they're apparently much older.
Same here. In my special needs class in Kearney, MO between 1993-1995.
1977
When did these come out?
This machine is a true jewelery. My school had a System 80 JLS version.
Used these in grade school in the 90's
Oh man, the memories... I remember thinking how cool this thing was (despite the anxiety it created.) Now it looks terribly antiquated, of course.
On a side note, the math lady is sounding a little Katharine Hepburn-ish now.
This has the typical design of computer equipment from the late 60s to the early 1980s.
Imagine when this product was new, and you see this machine that looks like something straight out of "2001: A Space Odyssey" sitting in your classroom. Your mind would be blown.
The Newcomb record player and Bell & Howell 16mm movie projector sitting near this device seem hidiously outdated in comparison.
Wow this brings back memories! I remember there being a thin paper that could be attached to the filmslide that would indicate how many of the questions you answered correctly. I believe that was only meant for certain sets in each kit. I remember on those it would say at the end with that shaggy green character "That's it, now take the record and filmslide out and give them to your teacher." Haven't seen one of these for probably nearly 40 years. I believe in the mid 80's, Borg Warner got out of the educational business and a company by the name of Josten's Learning Systems took over manufacturing these machines for a while until they dropped it in favor of selling computer software that did pretty much the same thing. There is still a webpage going by the name, system80.com but I'm not sure who owns it these days.
"Wow this brings back memories! I remember there being a thin paper that could be attached to the filmslide that would indicate how many of the questions you answered correctly"
That would mean that the card slot was a punch card maker in addition to a punch reader. I assumed that there was just a bunch of pins inside that would fit through the holes to tell the machine which answer is the correct one but there seems to be more to this?
Ugh - System 80. Our Fairfield County, CT grade school, in the 70s, had a multi-purpose room filled with carrolls and in each one, a System 80 machine. Hated being sent there. But oh how I recognized that droning monotone from the math lady in the first cartridge in the video above. An ice-pick to the ear she was. Funny - the main thing I remembered about the media was some weird little creature that appeared on screen, and there it is, at 9:54.
I literally learned how to do math and read on one of these primitive conputers
Used this as a student in reading class in the mud 70's
Omg so much memories I was in the 1st or 2nd grade lol 😂
Our class had one in 5th grade 1984/85
It's really a time capsule
Did I just buy your lesson 1f off of your ebay? I too have a system 80.
Yup! The whole System80 unit will be put on eBay at some point.
@@HyperPolaris I think I might have purchased yours lol -- it's working great if so.
Benjamin - Do you have any media still for sale/trade?
I used one of these In elementary school In the early 80s
Are the records worth anything, I found a bag of them. Someone please let me know.
Still have that bag? I'd be interested.
8:30 the angry burglar is breathing fire. You get an F
This is very interesting. I was thinking about this machine because I used it in elementary school back in 1976. I remember seeing an exercise where it would ask me to find a correct pair of words. It's neat how the system is able to tell the correct answers by the holes on the film and advance the stylus only if you are correct.
I also remember seeing a similar machine called PAL that had an error counter that advanced every time you hit a wrong button. I don't think the PAL machine had audio, but it had slides with questions similar to the System 80.
jeopardy60611 I also was taught with this machine, in roughly 1976-1977.
Did these machines have companion workbooks? I could have sworn I had a flimsy soft covered horizontaly(panoramic) shaped book. Maybe im thinking of a work book that wasn't associated withh System80 but was around the same era.
There was a bunch of classroom material associated with the machines. They were happy to sell the machines, but really wanted to sell a complete educational system and protocol. I never saw the extra books and materials, but I do remember looking through a teachers catalog when I was in isolation.