17 Oct
1998
17 Oct
'98
11:01 a.m.
Slashdot.org has a story explaining that the UK school system can't
afford NT 5 and are considering another OS. In light of this, people
were bringing up Apple's success in schools in contrast to the current
situation. However, I have heard that the only reason why Apples were
common in schools was that the gov't bore some of the price tag to
encourage use of Apples, and Apple didn't pay as much attention to
education as is generally thought. Is this true? What were the
particulars of Apple educational licensing?
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17 Oct
17 Oct
11:19 a.m.
On Sat, 17 Oct 1998, Max Eskin wrote:
Slashdot.org has a story explaining that the UK school
system can't
afford NT 5 and are considering another OS. In light of this, people
were bringing up Apple's success in schools in contrast to the current
situation. However, I have heard that the only reason why Apples were
common in schools was that the gov't bore some of the price tag to
encourage use of Apples, and Apple didn't pay as much attention to
education as is generally thought. Is this true? What were the
particulars of Apple educational licensing?
Well, I don't know about that. Every school I came up through had at
least an Apple lab. In fact, all the schools I attended (Los Angeles
Unified) had exclusively Apple ][s, and it wasn't until my senior year of
high school (1989) when I moved to northern California and attended a
totally new school that the school had an IBM lab, but they still had an
Apple lab (which was barely used until I raised a stink about it, and
encouraged the teachers to begin using it more to teach basic computer
skills, which they did).
Apple very actively marketed to schools, and as far as I know had special
deals in place to encourage wide-spread adoption in schools. If I'm
not mistaken, the schools were Apple's biggest market, and continued to
use Apple ][s well after they fell out of favor in the general
marketplace.
Where did you get your information from?
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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18 Oct
18 Oct
1:56 a.m.
On 17 Oct 98 at 15:02, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
::Well, I don't know about that. Every school I
came up through had at
::least an Apple lab. In fact, all the schools I attended (Los Angeles
::Unified) had exclusively Apple ][s, and it wasn't until my senior year of
::high school (1989) when I moved to northern California and attended a
::totally new school that the school had an IBM lab, but they still had an
::Apple lab (which was barely used until I raised a stink about it, and
::encouraged the teachers to begin using it more to teach basic computer
::skills, which they did).
Same here. I learned BASIC on an Apple ][+ in the La Mesa-Spring Valley
(San Diego) School District in '84, but even my high school had Apple ][e's
until only a couple of years ago when they switched locations and used a
grant to buy PCs. I think they have a Mac or two also (mostly as a token :-/).
Apples were most common here, but amazingly, at least one school in my district
had a lab of Commodore 64s (Commodore made an abortive effort to crack the
school market in 1989 but it flopped, of course), and the K-8 I went to for
junior high had a lab of CoCo 2s, connected by that fabulous network server
that acts like a cassette interface and served by a CoCo 3 with a disk drive.
I wrote a fraction division program, which was still in use years later -- it
was loaded off the CoCo 3 and then CLOADed onto the CoCo 2s before math period
started.
(Mr. Lamb also had two 64s there, sharing a miserably overworked 1541. :-)
--
The influence of schools on computers is interesting. Atari managed to crack
the German educational system and as a result the best programs for the Atari
ST have come from Germany. Programs such as Steinbergs Cubase and
E-logic's Notator started out on Ataris partly because of it's music
capabilities but mainly because of it beimg the machine so many Germans began
with. They were both ported to Wintel and Mac. Another example is Calamus the
desktop publishing program. To this day Germany is still the center for most
Atari ST activity and where the new clones are coming out of.
ciao larry
lwalker(a)interlog.com
24 Oct
24 Oct
2:58 p.m.
On Sat, 17 Oct 1998, Max Eskin wrote:
Slashdot.org has a story explaining that the UK school
system can't
afford NT 5 and are considering another OS. In light of this, people
were bringing up Apple's success in schools in contrast to the current
situation.
I thought that Acorn dominated the UK school system? Perhaps I heard
wrong.
At any rate, it's definitely country, if not region, specific, as I don't
recall ever hearing from anyone around here that they went to a school
with an Apple lab.
My high school had TRS-80s. Model IIIs, I think. Another one that I
visited had Ataris. Three people that I know had labs full of PETs
in school, though one of those labs was at a technical school and not
high school or elementary school.
My high school had a single Apple //e in the physics lab, but that's all.
Also several PETs in the music department, and an Altair 8800, which all
disappeared a year or two before I got there (I went to the open house
while my brother attended the school). One of those PETs is sitting in
the other room as I type this (my brother bought it from the high school
music teacher).
The TRS-80s were replaced with some rediculous things from France while I
was attending the school, but I can't remember the name of the computer
even though I saw one at the Salvation Army a while back. They were PC
semi-compatibles, I think.
The college I attended before entering university had at least two labs
full of Commodore PCs.
Sun and DEC seem to dominate the university I attend, with a sprinkling of
SGI, Macintosh, and Amiga.
Quebec government subsidies supported those things from France, and I
don't think Apple really had much of a foothold in the educational market
here. I could be wrong, of course, but when I mention PETs to people in
my classes now, often they mention that those were the first machines that
they used back in high school or elementary. I don't get the same
response for Apples, which were often owned at home but not used at
school. (And I was an Apple user back in my high school days, so I do
mention it.)
--
Doug Spence
ds_spenc(a)alcor.concordia.ca
http://alcor.concordia.ca/~ds_spenc/
5:55 p.m.
On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Doug Spence wrote:
Sun and DEC seem to dominate the university I attend,
with a sprinkling of
SGI, Macintosh, and Amiga.
And PCs running WinNT and/or Linux, too. Don't know how I forgot
those, except that I haven't had to deal with them myself yet. :) A
couple of years back they had quite a few boxes running OS/2.
They've recently renovated one of the Sun labs and I think some of the
older Sun boxen (3/50?) have disappeared. I'll have to find out what
happened to them.
--
Doug Spence
ds_spenc(a)alcor.concordia.ca
http://alcor.concordia.ca/~ds_spenc/
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5 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
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ckaiser＠oa.ptloma.edu -
dastar＠ncal.verio.com -
ds_spenc＠alcor.concordia.ca -
lwalker＠mail.interlog.com -
maxeskin＠hotmail.com