[Coco] The COCO vs The Apple II

[Chris Osborn]

On Jan 10, 2015, at 6:41 AM, Bill Loguidice <bill at armchairarcade.com> wrote:

> I remember in my school system in particular, while they had the usual
> smattering of Apple II's (usually one for every three classrooms), they
> actually standardized on Model III's and 4's for the programming classes

That pretty much describes the middle school I went to. There were II+ and IIe computers scattered about in different classrooms, mostly math classes. The “computer” class though was stocked with TRS-80 Model III computers because the principal of the school had a I or a III at home and had been sold on them.

I remember the first day I walked into the computer class and sat down at a model III and was blown away by how crude it was. I had already been programming for a year or two at home on an Apple II+ and had written a lot of software and couldn't believe that the computers in the computer class were monochrome and had no true graphics capability! (If you want to see some of the Apple software I wrote back then, I posted it here: http://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/120 ) 

I only used the TRS-80 for a day or two because I immediately asked the teacher why the computers were so crude and she found out I already knew how to program. For the rest of the class I sat off in the corner away from everyone else and worked on a IIe and II+ that were set aside for "advanced" students because they didn't have enough Apples for everyone. The assigments were trivial though and I remember finishing them in 5 or 10 minutes and the rest of the class was goof-off time for me to work on whatever I wanted.

A year or two after I graduated from that middle school I found out that they had realized how awful the Model III computers were and they had gone around and taken all of the Apples from all the scattered classrooms and put them all in the computer class.

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