Educational use of the Apple II wasn't about policy though, it was just that the Apple II was already incredibly popular and had lots of software (Visicalc for example, the first spreadsheet) available. It's commercial success drove educational adoption not the other way round.
Conversely the BBC Micro was picked as a winner by the BBC back when it's predecessor systems were also-rans. This drove educational purchases, and ultimately led to ARM.
Honestly the main thing that drove the US tech sector was the invention of the integrated circuit, and massive scale. Europe back then was still very balkanised, the EEC (which became the EU) was only just getting going.
Fully agree with your last point, Europe was and still is much more bureaucratic.
My last point was explicitly also about how it enabled your first paragraph. Apple II at the time wasn't cheap, nor were other computers. Government grants for computers in education created a market that could be then targeted by Apple (and anyone who thinks Apple didn't dedicate serious resources into capturing that market is naive at best)
> Apple IIs were in most schools. That was what stood out to most people - out of all the various and weird computers on the market at the time, and before IBM clones they were different, Apple was the one "endorsed" by the school system.
That's why I think, more than any specific feature of the hardware, the real driver of Apple II success in US was always the one-and-only Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium [1]. I don't think that Apple II would have had anything near as much as the same sort of US-wide reach without its "PBS of educational software" existing at that critical juncture point in history. "Every" school in the country needed an Apple II to run MECC software, because MECC software was easily approved to be parts of the curriculum.
The Macintosh was seen as the computer for education riding on the coat-tails of MECC products and the few produced for the early Macintosh. PCs became more common in education exactly as soon as MECC was destroyed by vultures and schools needed to start penny pinching because there were few other as easily approved pieces of software to replace MECC's brief central place in the US classroom.
(The fall of MECC was its own sad reminder of how privatization often leads to vultures and scavenging. It is interesting to wonder what might have happened had MECC better followed the "PBS" model, and possibly gotten more national arts and sciences resources behind it, instead of IPO then buyout by vultures.)
I agree Apple did well by getting entrenched in the education market in the US.
Combined with Tandy's failure to follow up, and Commodore's incessant bungling in the US market (such as repeatedly pissing off their dealer network by letting their dealers absorb unannounced price changes) and decision to send most of its stock to Europe where they got higher margins, that explains more of it than lack of alternatives.
In Europe, Apple remained virtually unheard of until the Mac compared to Commodore, Atari and homegrown brands.
Largely thanks to its European market, Commodore still massively outsold Apple in terms of units shipped up until well into the Mac got popular - it's just that by the time the IIe started getting traction, Commodore had abandoned the high end and gone for volume, and by the time they went after the high end again, it was 1985, and Commodore's brand and sales channel in the US was even more tied to the cheap gaming image.
But if you wanted sharp, readable 80-column text you had several alternatives at the time of the IIe launch, at around the same price range, both from Commodore and others (from Commodore, the later entrants in the PET range - one is actually on display in my local library - as well as the ill fated Commodore B128-80)
Most of the other entrants that could compete for productivity applications in the same price range were from small unknown companies or insufficiently compatible with anything to get enough software, though, and so had little chance.
Are you American? Macs were much less common in Europe and particularly in England. In fact England had its own educational computer in the 80s as a venture between then BBC and Acorn, the company that invented the original ARM CPUs.
IIRC Apple was donating lots of Apple IIs to schools in California in the 80s and then still maintained a disproportionately (compared to other states) high market share in the educational market in the 90s and 2000s. This presumably had a multi-generational effect as people graduating from those schools were more likely to buy Macs and then children growing up in those households were more used to them than Windows PCs etc.
Apple marketed directly to schools in the US. They were successful at this all the way through the mid 90s. Nobody I knew at the time used Apple computers at home, but every school had Apple computers in a lab and in the library.
Again anecdotal, but my experience was that state schools had BBC Micros but private schools and many technology-focused colleges had AppleIIs. Apples were very expensive. I remember helping out at a technology college night class where people were being taught Logo programming (and later Pascal). It was the first time I'd seen more than one ApppleII in a room at a time (this class had a doze or so, two people to machine).
In the early 1980s, Apple decided that they were going to own the education market. They sent salespeople to school districts, explaining that computers -- the future of education, as everyone and magazine articles said -- could be affordable, and here was a complete plan including discounts, financing, and software.
The result was that the Apple II series did take over the education market, and also sold quite a few machines to the parents of kids who used Apples in school.
Schools bought them because that was what schools bought in the late 70's and it did carry over even into the IBM era (1981+). To Apple's credit, they did get how to do educational sales.
I didn't know anyone who owned one personally, but that was probably an income-based observation.
It was hugely popular and influential in a way that only the PC and its clones ever eclipsed. (the picture was probably a bit different in Europe)
As far as the hardware itself, it really doesn't compare to Amigas and 32-bit Ataris and so on. It managed to stay popular a long time by providing a software ecosystem that people were comfortable developing for and buying into and by Apple's courting relationships with schools.
Fun personal note: I grew up about two miles from MOS Technology's HQ!
The overall point I'm making is that for years Apple
sold inferior hardware at vastly inflated prices, and
made up for it only in superior marketing
This is a simplistic take that ignores some key actual reasons. There's no argument that the C64 was superior in terms of graphics and sound although even that comes with a caveat.
Marketing is not why Apple beat Commodore, or at least far from the only reason. Nobody bought Apples because of the ads. I don't remember even seeing an Apple ad on TV, and people weren't so impressed by magazine ads that they would go spend an extra $1,000 on Apple.
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1. The Apple II's were much more expandable thanks to their expansion slots, and there was a big ecosystem in place here already by the time the C64 gathered steam. You can see a somewhat similar dynamic at work today with RaspberryPi. There are competitors with more powerful hardware but with RaspberryPi, the ecosystem is the draw.
2. The Apple II (and soon after, the Mac) dominated the US education market. They developed strong relationships with schools, and had the most "educational" software titles.
3. 80-column mode. I know there were ways to achieve it on a C64, but what percentage of titles supported it? Additionally, a lot of folks had their C64s hooked up to crappy TVs that couldn't display it.
4. The C64's superior graphics and sound ability hurt it in the minds of many consumers. It was cheaper than an Apple II, but as far as parents were concerned that was still a lot of money to pay for a "game machine." Whereas the even more expensive Apple II, with a better selection of educational and "serious" software, was seen more as an investment in a child's future.
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I can tell you that in our household, #2 and #4 were why my (non tech savvy) parents bought us an Apple. They wanted me to have "what schools used."
Did they make the right choice? Well, the Apple IIgs we got was definitely underwhelming. Obviously a C128 or Amiga would have been better for gaming and writing fun stuff. But, our local school district did use Apples back then. So it was kind of an advantage for me, to have one at home.
I used those at school and liked them a lot but, I guess like the Apple II, nobody would have bought one for their home because they were expensive and sold mostly through education channels.
In the 80s they generally switched to BBC Micros, which were affordable enough that some better-off families had their own.
So I can see it being a regional thing that I never used an Apple II -- they didn't appear in schools in the UK -- but I wonder about other countries besides the US. Was the Apple all that widespread anywhere else?
My UK knowledge from those days was thanks to Crash, Your Sinclair, BBC Micro, Input Magazine and Computer Shopper, so I might be bit biased in regards to any sort of Apple's widespread adoption.
For us, the Spectrum was everything the Apple ][ was to you. But the BBC Micro used a lot in education is probably what you should really be comparing the Apple ][ to. It was better than the Apple ][ in many ways. It had most of the features, but it had some really innovative stuff. Not least the Tube - that allowed a co processor - but could be anything. The BBC Micro was 6502, but the Tube allowed Z80 so you could run CPM. It was also the tool that Acorn apparently used developed the ARM processor prototypes.
The main issue with the Apple ][ was that it stayed more or less the same for its entire life, and the way is was got dated. The difference between the PET and the C64 is that the design evolved (but the basic fabric was pretty similar.) I know there was the Apple 2 GS later, but that was a lot later and probably a little too late.
IMO the European computer scene was very different from the US, and in many ways more advanced. Because there was constant innovation and competition. That drove things forward, and affected the US computer manufacturers indirectly as they wanted to sell in to this market. So we had all the US computers (Commodore, RadioShack, Atari, TI etc), but also (at least in the UK) Sinclair ZX80/ZX81/ZX Spectrum (TS1000 and most other Timex machines were based on this range), Tangerine Oric 1/Atmos, Amstrad CPC/PCW/NC, Camputers Lynx, Dragon 32/64, Enterprise 64/128, Grundy Newbrain, Jupiter ACE, Memotech MTX range, Acorn Atom/BBC/Electron/Archimedes (latter, for which they invented and used the ARM processor). Our 80's 8bit journey was rich and varied.
Growing up in Norway I never saw an Apple II in person. Apple didn't get a presence until the Mac, which for the first few years stood largely ignored in a corner of my local computer store.
It emphasises how much peoples views of these brands were shaped by geographical differences. Commodore totally dominated in large parts of Europe, where Apple was a weird curiosity, behind Commodore, Spectrum, Amstrad. Even machines like Oric and Apricot had more of a presence. Atari was also rare until the ST. Eventually even Acorn Archimedes became more common to see in my circles than Apple. Briefly.
Elsewhere in Europe the list of machines was different, but from what I remember Apple struggled to get a foothold most places until the Mac. Largely I suspect because it was so expensive compared to most of the above.
It was first in the mid-90s Apple became something I came across regularly.
Conversely the BBC Micro was picked as a winner by the BBC back when it's predecessor systems were also-rans. This drove educational purchases, and ultimately led to ARM.
Honestly the main thing that drove the US tech sector was the invention of the integrated circuit, and massive scale. Europe back then was still very balkanised, the EEC (which became the EU) was only just getting going.
Fully agree with your last point, Europe was and still is much more bureaucratic.
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