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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

Apple ][ was the school computer and the upper middle class computer. Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, Radio Shack and TI (when the TI-99/4A went on sale) were the computers that introduce computing to a whole generation of families without the income to afford Apple. Its telling that both Atari and Commodore sold more computers than Apple for a lot of years.

Its a shame that both Commodore and Atari forgot what their niche was.

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You nailed the description. At my school they had one Apple ][ and this infuriating rule that only kids who had an Apple computer at home could use it. Us poor kids had to use TRS-80 model 3s. I carried an anti-Apple grudge for years and years because of that policy.

That is really a horrible policy. What were they thinking?

The kids not familiar with it would mess it up?

I mean good? I learned a lot by messing up stuff. School is a great place to make plenty of mistakes.

But they are expensive and the teachers didn't know how to fix them. At my school it was a similar setup, getting access to the computer lab was guarded like the crown jewels and the one guy who could program never said a word to me. I got a 486 the year after and at that point couldn't care less about the old boxes we had to school. Pity they didn't even brush on programming, it was all word processing making and bad computer art (easy to mark, the winner got to print theirs out in colour!).

Especially on those machines: You could simply press the reset button and it would go back to a pristine state. There was no hard drive or other state that persisted across reboots.

The worst you could possibly do was destroy a program stored on disk or a cassette.

At my UK state school in the 80s, they had a similar policy for musical instruments. They only gave music lessons to those that already were having private lessons (!)

UK is a very class based society. You must stick to your class.

I get the feeling my school age self would have been filled with a bit of rage at the teacher and the students who got to use the Apple computers. The TRS-80 Model 3 wasn't bad, but it wasn't exactly the funnest machine.

Well, I would guess that would teach a lesson, but probably not the one they wanted.

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