An Apple (II) for Teacher
59 points by cfmcdonald 4 days ago | 24 comments
  • NoSalt 3 days ago |
    I had NO idea that the Woz knew David Lee Roth! It totally makes sense and completely surprises me at the same time.
  • empressplay 3 days ago |
  • mproud 3 days ago |
    As a kid who grew up in the public schools in Minnesota, MECC was amazing, and Apple II’s were everywhere. Each classroom had a computer, and our school had an entire computer lab. We had access to every piece of MECC software — history, math, spelling, social studies, and many other titles like Print Shop. All of the software was very, very good.

    There are a few stories about Oregon Trail, one of the most popular games that was originally written by a few Carleton students for the public schools on older computer hardware that was then rewritten for the Apple II. (It’s so iconic, Xennials in America are sometimes nicknamed the “Oregon Trail Generation” because of how pervasive the game was in schools to help teach about the westward migration in the mid-19th century.) Supposedly, Apple put in a bid at the last minute with the state and won the school contract, and they had a virtual monopoly in the public schools in Minnesota.

    • sleepybrett 3 days ago |
      Hell I grew up in WA and maybe we had a similar program because every elementary classroom had at least one //e full time, several more in the library and like a dozen on carts that they could roll into any classroom. I didn't see any other type of computer in any of my schools until high school where we had a lab of PCs for 'business' a lab of apple //gs' for programming classes (pascal), and several macs in the graphics arts lab for doing layout on.

      I remember playing oregon trail while studying the westward migration, I remember sitting in the classroom during lunch fiddling with turtle graphics. Either the district or the school had a turtle robot that you could hook up via serial and it would drive around on a piece of butcher paper on the floor and draw with a sharpie.

    • dhosek 3 days ago |
      MECC software was ubiquitous outside Minnesota as well. I remember it showing up in my Illinois grade school in 1981–2.
    • homarp 3 days ago |
      A lot of MECC disk images are available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22mecc%22
    • jwstarr 3 days ago |
      > Supposedly, Apple put in a bid at the last minute with the state and won the school contract, and they had a virtual monopoly in the public schools in Minnesota.

      Dale LaFrenz, who was helping administer MECC, states [1] that Apple won the bid because they filed the only compliant bid. The board was leaning towards TRS-80, but Radio Shack didn't want to bother with the state's bureaucratic bid process.

      [1] https://conservancy.umn.edu/items/7f6d8e9e-0560-43e0-9050-3a...

  • jamesgill 3 days ago |
    "His [Wozniak's] subsequent ventures, including a stint teaching computer skills to students in the Los Gatos School District, were marked by amiability and good nature, not a will to technological power."

    Woz is the kind of nerd I always aspired to be.

  • alpha_trion 3 days ago |
    Apple IIs and Commodore VIC20 were my first exposure to computers as a kid. My elementary school had a lab of Apple IIs, played a good amount of Oregon Trail on it.
  • psim1 3 days ago |
    I went through elementary and middle school using MECC software on Apple II, and of course had no idea at the time what a treasure it was. My generation was at the beginning of the computer-education revolution; we had "gamified" learning before that was ever a thing.

    An Apple II on a wheeled desk-cart was always popular in elementary school.

  • jbgreer 3 days ago |
    I was fortunate to go to a high school that acquired a single Apple ][+ kept on a rolling cart that was locked in the chemistry lab closet for safekeeping. Every school day at 2:15PM there was a race to see which student could claim it until they finally kicked everyone out of the building. Thankfully I had pretty fast legs and a nearby last classroom. Our first “instructor” had the good sense to know he was never going to keep up with a bunch of rabid students; I don’t recall any of the lessons, but I recall the experiments we devised.

    In 1983 I purchased my first personal computer, an Apple //e. By then we had an entire lab of Apples and Franklins, but I no longer needed to stay. The setup at home was more convenient, but the limitations imposed by the previous setup had a powerful focusing effect: hand-written programs, carefully reviewed and mentally simulated.

    Fun times. Thank you, Steve, Woz, et al.

    • dhosek 3 days ago |
      I had a similar situation, first computer access was a single Apple (Packard-Bell) ][+ on a rolling cart that normally lived in the closet of the 6–8 grade science teacher at my elementary school. I would stay after school every day to write programs on that, first in BASIC and later in 6502 Assembly. Floppy disks were a luxury to me, let alone actually owning a computer, and all my programs were handwritten in spiral-bound graph-paper notebooks. Even though I wouldn’t own my first Apple computer until 15 years later, I was still a life-long Apple fan, even when I was stuck on other operating systems over the decades.
      • dhosek 3 days ago |
        To this day, my mental model of a computer is still a 64K Apple ][+ and my imaginings of how I would extend it given the capability to do so. My idea of a graphics system that didn’t rely on main memory to represent the bit map turned out to be predictive of how graphics cards now work, albeit constrained by the imagination of a high school student in the 80s.
      • moosedev 3 days ago |
        > a single Apple (Packard-Bell) ][+

        I'm curious what were you referring to here. Did Packard Bell make Apple 2 clones? I didn't find anything in a quick search.

  • RyanOD 3 days ago |
    I had the best of both worlds. Apple ][ at school...Commodore 64 at home.

    In some ways, it was a great time to be a kid.

  • LargeWu 3 days ago |
    Didn't see it mentioned in the article, but Apple also had a program called "An Apple for a Teacher" which allowed teachers to purchase directly from Apple at a big discount for personal use. My dad secured a IIgs this way, which mostly found use as a gaming machine for myself. But it certainly helped to reinforce the Apple -> schools pipeline because teachers wanted to use what they knew.
  • platevoltage 3 days ago |
    We had Apple IIgs' in school, and my aunt and uncle had one at their house. I wasted so much ImageWriter ribbon over there. Later we got our first computer, a Macintosh LC with an Apple IIe card in it, and my mom brought all the MECC software home from school. Good times.
  • DonHopkins 2 days ago |
    I love the Biorhythm program on my Apple II -- it sure was great for impressing cool hippie chicks.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYoY1cwAd90

  • DonHopkins 2 days ago |
    > The promised clock chip was not ready in time

    Oh the irony!

  • satiated_grue 2 days ago |
    I was fortunate to go to a high school that got a single Apple ][+ in the science department for physics, and a grant to pay a student programmer to develop educational physics software. I was further fortunate to be the student programmer, which was amazing after spending the past few years punching FORTRAN IV and COBOL on cards using an IBM 029 and batching them to the school district's IBM 360 overnight.
  • FatherOfCurses a day ago |
    My high school had two comp labs with a combination of IIe's and IIc's.

    The first year the building was opened one of the labs was put in a carpeted room and it took a while for people to figure out why their programs kept disappearing from their 5 1/4 inch floppy disks.

    In computer science class we were given a certain number of days to write and test our programs. If we finished early we could use the rest of the lab time to game. I used to plan out my projects and write them out longhand at home and type in and test my code the first day of lab to maximize my gaming time.

    Lots of computer joy early in my life was thanks to the IIe and IIc.