RocketMan on 5/12/2008 at 01:33
awww you found his game so fast....
actually I'll probably learn about other cool games i wish i'd played...how come everyone had macs in their schools??
io organic industrialism on 5/12/2008 at 01:43
Quote Posted by dethtoll
meeting with our mothers as well as his extended family about demon possession and the evils of modern media, among other things. Man growing up was a blast.
Man I got a similar lecture when I started playing pen and paper Dungeons & Dragons with a few friends, because my mom had watched this movie where these kids play a game called "Dungeons & Dragons", except they played it in a sewer, with swords, and one kid died. Wow...
The writers of that movie, what a bunch of asshats... Giving 14 year old kids a hard time everywhere ..
june gloom on 5/12/2008 at 01:55
It's really hard to find out exactly
why Apples were abundant in schools (particularly in North America) in the 80s and early 90s, but my guess is that it has to do with the fact that the Apple II basically beat out its relatively small competition. These days we have some 40 dozen brands, and that's if you just buy out-of-the-box PCs, to say nothing of home-built PCs. But back then there were only a few brands.
I think Apples may have gained a foothold when they made a deal with Bell and Howard to sell a few Apple IIs in the 80s. The FCC would not allow Apple, which has always been very active in providing computers to schools, to sell the Apple II because it was not (
http://www.ul.com) UL compliant. It was possible to run Apple IIs while the case was open, which violated UL standards. So Apple made a deal with Bell and Howard, a majour supplier to schools of A/V equipment, to sell a modified "Darth Vader" model that was all black and could not be opened as easily. This gave them an "in" over other personal computers of the time, such as the IBM 5100.)
ZymeAddict on 5/12/2008 at 21:44
Yeah, I'd always heard Apple made deals with a bunch of school districts and universities to supply them bulk orders of computers on the cheap.
I'm guessing it's probably one of the main things that kept them going during the years before the iPod and OS X made Apple products cool again.
io organic industrialism on 5/12/2008 at 21:58
Yep, I remember in first grade, Apple came and whored themselves out to our school, gave a big speech about how awesome they were and gave out free t-shirts.
swaaye on 8/12/2008 at 22:11
Had Apple IIs in elementary school. Remember when I got to mess with a new IIGS, wow that was nifty. It had that UI and fancy gfx/audio. First CD-ROM drive I used was on that too and got to play with Grolier encyclopedia!! Then in junior high we had Mac Plus comps. Second year there they got some Mac LCs (color!).
In high school we had a mix of LCs, Pluses, and other stuff as time went by. In '94 got to mess with PowerMac 6100s (I felt my high-end, tweaked, overclocked 486 was faster, honestly). Played with a Quadra 660AV. And newer PowerMacs as time went on. We got a big lab of Compaq Pentium 100s around '96 for the first networked WWW lab in the library. The tech-ed wing had PCs most of the time, for industrial and scientific applications. Macs were used for writing/publishing classes.
If I hadn't had exposure to Macs in school, I would never have used them. That would've been tragic because Apple's OS's were cool and certainly way more usable than Windows prior to 9x. You don't really see them anywhere else. I'm totally a PC guy, but do have an appreciation for what Apple makes. Kinda nostalgic for those old System 7 era machines too cuz of how much time I put into them at school.
Then I went to college and Macs almost disappeared. They were only in the humanities building, AFAIK, again for writing and publishing classes. Everywhere else we had PCs and Sun workstations. This was the first time I ran into serious Unix-oriented systems, with Solaris. PCs were the general purpose do all machines of course. I basically went out of touch with Macs from there on out. Still rarely see them today.
Quote Posted by dethtoll
That's the one, thanks.
As I recall, my friend's mother, who was very religious (just like mine) took offense to the game and he and I were subjected to a nasty little meeting with our mothers as well as his extended family about demon possession and the evils of modern media, among other things. Man growing up was a blast.
Yikes!!! :)
Vraptor7 on 9/12/2008 at 13:26
I remember an educational red riding hood game that only kids who had finished the day's work could play. I don't have any idea what computer it was but in my retroactive assessment the game had shoddy graphics and was crap. Later on in middle school we had james pond in class, which I hardly got to play. Apogee games were my fascination back in the days of BBSes.
Jason Moyer on 9/12/2008 at 14:03
I'm glad we had Apple ]['s in elementary school, otherwise I would have never discovered the incredible greatness of Robot Odyssey.
icemann on 9/12/2008 at 16:32
We had Macs towards the end when I was in primary school (grade 5 back in 91). Back then we were told that "Macs were better than pcs for homework", and when I got to highschool they were still singing the same damn tune, even though we had windows 3.1 by then. My high school had pcs I`d not heard of before called "Acorns" which had monochrome screens and weren`t very good at all. But they had text adventure games on them so that was something back then.
It wasn`t until I was in year 10 that my high school upgraded all their pcs, skipping windows 3.1 entirely and went straight for windows 95. But in the "IT" areas they still had friggin Macs. And it stayed that way till after I finished there 2 years after that.
Now some 10 years later I`ve gone off to uni (after working for the last 7 years) to do games development, and in my 3d class we`re being told once again that "Macs are better". And going by word of mouth I`d believe that when it comes to 3d related stuff. But my pc at home (which admittedly is a pretty damn good pc) compared to the uni Macs does 3d in Maya better. So meh who knows.
