In 1991, MSC got the necessary permit to offer two-year courses in Office Management (OMC) and Computer Technology (CTC). In June of that year, classes for the two courses started with fifty (50) OMC and twenty-six (26) CTC students.
MSC at that time was occupying the second floor of the Jesusa building (on the first floor was Monte de Piedad Savings Bank) along A. Flores St. Its two classrooms had a capacity of 50 students only. MSC had to set morning and afternoon sessions to accommodate the new two-year course students totaling more than 70. Schedule for the short term course students were also set strategically so that there will be a classroom for each class. Saturday and evening classes were conducted.
The short-term courses FCO (Fundamentals of Computer Operation) and FCP (Fundamentals of Computer Programming) became important subjects for the two-year courses. Students studied DOS, Wordstar, Lotus and Dbase – software which a teen today may never have heard of, much more know how to use. Computer screens were black and white and if you are not so lucky, “green”.
A requirement for these subjects was a set of diskettes – those thin, square plastic sheets containing a circular disk inside. The 3.5-inch diskettes were rare then, the 5.25-inch floppies were the “in” thing. Computers in the lab had no hard disk drives (only the office PC had disk drives) and the diskettes contain the software and the data. PC users today will laugh at the thought that those floppy disks can contain a maximum of only 340kb!
Windows was unheard of and the Internet had not yet arrived in this part of the globe, but yes there were computer games, among them – Pacman, Block out, Space Invaders, Sokoban, etc.
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