Educational subsidies

From: Lawrence Walker <lwalker_at_mail.interlog.com>
Date: Sun Oct 18 05:56:23 1998

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_at_interlog.com
Received on Sun Oct 18 1998 - 05:56:23 BST