Sorry if I implied the powerbook was being used in 1989. Didn't get that until my senior year. My brief reminiscence was more of a broad sweep of those years in that town.
In 1989 I was still using (at home) an Atari 800 with matching disc wheel printer. Though I spent far more time in the computer lab with its Macs until I got my early graduation present. Kinda miss the lab days. I made more friends there in the sleep-deprived craziness of the overnights than I did in the coffee shops.
I had access to a lab of 512k/512kE/Plus Macs at the "gifted and talented" program in my public school district in Pennsylvania in 1985-199x, officially one day every 5-10 days, but ended up skipping regular classes, staying late, etc. with the cooperation of a couple of the teachers to use the lab more. HyperCard! Some "choose your own adventure" style game creation toolkit. Some early Mac games. Pascal. early SimCity. Some kind of dialup to somewhere (probably local BBSes? I think Fido mail too).
The main schools at the time had c64, Commodore PET, and then in middle school, labs of Apple II with sometimes IIgs; much less worthwhile, and all in structured classes like "we will all learn to type".
I mowed a lot of lawns, etc to save up for a Mac Classic 1/0 for $899 in 1990. (I had a "colecovision adam" before that, with the tape drive, printer, etc., which was essentially a word processor and games machine even when I got it; a c64 or apple II would have been a vastly better choice for a kid back then). I did Mac stuff with it for a few more years (very simple programming, hacking around with ResEdit, keeping up with the prepress going to digital transition, desktop publishing, etc.), but once I got VMS and UNIX accounts, and various dial-ups, and a modem, it turned into a glorified terminal. I eventually got a 486sx25 and then a P90 to replace it, running early 386BSD, BSD/OS, and Linux, but didn't get back into Macs until 2007 at a startup.
In 1994 my typing class was still using Apple II's. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but I find it quite impressive that I was using the same computers in my senior high school class as my 1984 1st grade computer class.
I'm from New York City and the computers in the schools were TRS-80s. The idea that Apple was everything is not accurate. Remember you had PETs, S100, SS50 and other computers out there.
Personally I think the real transition to personal computing happened later when non wealthy families started to get them.
The 90s was a really weird time. One school that was ”richer” would have bought early Macs and still be using them, whereas a poorer school wouldn’t have been able to buy until the time of the iMac and handily defeat the older machines.
My schools in the 80s and 90s had computer labs full of macs too. They were terrible. Way too little ram, loaded down with student repressing software, and they crashed all the time. At home, I had speedy packard bell, tandy, and dell computers. I thought I'd never buy a mac. But here I am, typing away on a macbook pro. Their computers have gotten a lot better.
I was in college about this time; did a lot of programming on the Apple //e. I didn't have one, but the college I attended had a lab full of them in the business department, and a lab full of boring green-screen IBMs in the computer science department. What can I say, I like color. I wrote a bunch of Apple code that is long gone and not lamented, and created some RPG materials that I did rescue from the floppys a couple of decades ago.
I grew up in the 80's, and the Apple II was basically everywhere in education! I remember we had a lab full of Apple IIe's. I had a IIc at home, but moved on to the Amiga sometime in middle school.
Yep, same here in Canada. My mother was a teacher and my father a sometimes-unemployed machinist, so on the upper side of working class, really, and big exciting family expenditures in the early & mid 80s were things like a microwave or a dishwasher which we could afford maybe once a year at tax return time. It was a big expenditure for them to get me the VIC-20, which I ran off an older B&W 9" TV. Saved my own allowance money & money from bottle recycle returns to get a used Atari 520ST in 1987.
They had a single Macintosh at the school, which I sometimes got to play with. Even the Apple II was priced out of the "home" market possibilities. Family friends had one, but it was like a luxury product like their hi-fi system or boats.
Maybe the US was a different story. But here a Mac was way out of the reach out of people on a typical income.
Also people didn't typically take on debt like they do now. Interest rates were double-digits.
As an 1980's elementary school student, we had schools full of Apple II's.
Now, a lot of them were the older monochrome models, but we had some color models, and a handful of them were the IIGS models. We had all the standard games like Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Carmen Sandiego, plus the typing tutors, Print Shop...
We had a couple PC's here and there. Almost all IBM. They were a different experience. You didn't just stick a disk in and it booted up into your game. You had to deal with DOS. We had the PC versions of a couple of those games, but the PC's were more for writing documents, using the early CD-ROM encyclopedias, that sort of stuff. We had a couple Macs as well, which were used for the same things.
Sure, we had Appleworks and all that, but the Apple II was for fun-and the IBM PC was for 'work'.
I didn't have a computer at home back then, but my dream was a IIGS of my own.
Our school had an Apple II in 1982 but they were quite expensive, so people mostly got Sinclair machines or Commodore 64s for home use. When I went to 6th form they had a few BBCs and an old Commodore PET. I don't the Apple IIs were common, but they were certainly around.
Sounds like you're talking about old hardware though. I grew up in a Mac household and used Macs in school. We had a 128k in the 80s, but moved to the IIsi, IIci, Performa 520, PowerBooks, and PowerMacs, using various LCs in school. The PowerBooks were always black-and-white in the 68k days due to the state of LCDs at the time, but everything else I used from the 1990 IIsi on was in full color.
I had one of those PowerComputing clones back in the day and loved it. I still have some of those marketing posters, and recall that season of Mac history with fondness. It’s a shame the Mac clone market got killed off.
Wow, didn't realize all those were from 1981. I loved growing up in the 70s/80s. Begged for a computer for 3 years and finally got an Apple //e in 1983. Still have it today :-)
I admit that 1988 was before I was born, but I was playing games over AppleTalk!
Super Maze Wars on my dad's PowerBook connected to the family LC III gave plenty of fun to my brother and I. Why fight in real life, when I can shoot him on a computer game?
When we weren't playing networked games, we'd use whatever came on the latest MacFormat floppy/CD. Shanghai II, Spelunx, Shufflepuck, Beebop II. I learned to draw in Kid Pix, and code in Logowriter (not only patterns, but even music synthesis, on a Mac Plus, when I was 7-9 years old).
In 1989 I was still using (at home) an Atari 800 with matching disc wheel printer. Though I spent far more time in the computer lab with its Macs until I got my early graduation present. Kinda miss the lab days. I made more friends there in the sleep-deprived craziness of the overnights than I did in the coffee shops.
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