An Apple (II) for Teacher
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An Apple (II) for Teacher
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Re: An Apple (II) for Teacher
#2I had NO idea that the Woz knew David Lee Roth! It totally makes sense and completely surprises me at the same time.
Re: An Apple (II) for Teacher
#3Related: Steve Wozniak Talks Disk ][ https://paleotronic.com/2018/05/19/steve-wozniak-talks-disk/
Re: An Apple (II) for Teacher
#4As 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.
Re: An Apple (II) for Teacher
#5"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.
Re: An Apple (II) for Teacher
#6Apple 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.
Re: An Apple (II) for Teacher
#7I 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.
Re: An Apple (II) for Teacher
#8As 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 ga…
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.
Re: An Apple (II) for Teacher
#9I 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.
Re: An Apple (II) for Teacher
#10I 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 go…
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.