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Were you there? From the late 80s to mid-late 90s all my classrooms had Apple computers and Macs. Late 90s seemed to be the transition to "IBM compatible" PCs.


I was there (and then) living across different European countries in the 90s and IBM compatibles were the de facto computing standard followed by niche products like the Amiga which had a dedicated following, mostly hobbyists. But for all intents and purposes the mac was just a zombie platform over here. The first Mac that I had ever seen was the original blue iMac.


I was. There were lots of Apple computers, yes. There were not very many Macs, though. The labs full of IIe and IIgs gave way to PCs, with no era for Macs in between. There were never more than a handful of Macs around at all, and they were the cheaper ones (LC and low-end Performa). There was a small resurgence in schools with the first iMacs, but by then PC was solidly dominant. The iMacs weren't that popular with students, though, because they lacked floppy drives. Flash drives were still small and expensive, the cloud didn't exist yet, and CD-Rs weren't a good fit for small, short-lived, often-changed files.


In my high school (late 1980s, early 1990s) we had mostly Apple IIe systems for student use and a couple PCs in the school office. When I was copy editor for the school newspaper, articles were done in AppleWorks, printed on an ImageWriter in NLQ in columns and literally pasted up on a master for layout which we photocopied.




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