27 Jun
2012
27 Jun
'12
9:43 a.m.
On Jun 27, 2012, at 12:26 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
On 27 June 2012 15:52, David Riley <fraveydank at
gmail.com> wrote:
We never had one; my school had plenty, though. The teachers had to
make me go outside for recess.
Also, I mean, kids are picking this thing up for real and using it.
How can you not love this? It's what the Apple II was for me when
I was 6.
For me when I was 12, the Apple II was about 6 months of my parent's
income and there was no way I was /ever/ going to get one. They spent
the money on sending me to school instead. By the time I was 14 or so, I got a Spectrum for ?80
($125) - probably
meant a month's spare money for my folks, but doable.
I have Googled but I can't find a price for a new Apple II in the UK,
but assuming the old swap-the-dollar-for-a-pound-sign trick, a used
Spectrum was one-tenth of the price of a new Apple II 2-3 years
earlier.
I knew other kids who owned Spectrums, C64s, Dragons, Orics and maybe
BBC Micros if their parents were both rich and boring. I never knew
anyone who owned an Apple - they were just /way/ too expensive.
I don't recall much about the pricing. Plenty of my friends had C64s,
which were essentially equivalent in popularity over here in the US
to the Spectrum in the UK (which makes a certain amount of sense;
one was an import in one place and not the other). I wonder how much
that affected the UK pricing of the machines.
But there was a huge push to get Apples in schools here, helped by
the fact that the state of Minnesota paid for an awful lot of Apple
II software to be developed (most of my memories of the Apple II
aside from learning BASIC were from MECC educational games).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC
So for me, it was fairly dominant. My parents had a Macintosh,
which I played plenty of games on, but you certainly couldn't just
hit the reset button and drop into a BASIC interpreter on the Mac.
It was, of course, the expensive machine, but my father used it
for work (desktop publishing), so it paid for itself fairly quickly.
- Dave