Ok so hey #Canada #GenX especially people from #Winnipeg who spent time in Eaton Place downtown in the early 80s, because that is the specific instance of what I'm certain was in many government offices and such.
Ok. It is maybe 1980 I'm late single digits and I go downtown with my gramma a lot, and we spend a fair amount of time in Eaton Place, her doing whatever she did, and me doing a circuit of Petland, a record store on the second floor, the arcade, and near the North entrance of the South building, there was a government office of some kind.
In that government office, there was a computer. Not one that #retro heads would recognize, it was large, did simple colour graphics, and had a weird nonstandard keyboard about the size of a gigantic TV remote, on a curly cable. Possibly some sort of Unix thing and I think it was networked, presumably on the Internet.
It mostly did very boring stuff and I was just a kid, I didn't care about whatever its main functions were, but I had learned that if I entered f518, there was a graphical mystery house game of some kind.
I remember that office had a fair amount of techy stuff, like, there was a kind of pushbutton video jukebox where you could watch various promotional videos, I remember one of the things it played was a Folklorama ad with the "la-lalala-la-lalalaaa" earworm, which my older California chick cousin and I laughed at one summer day that we were all downtown.
I would really love to find out what was the deal with that computer system, though.
