alt Hacker NewsAround here it was schools. Every machine in every school in every district was an apple, from the 80s to the late 90s. Many thousands of kids spent more time using those than anything else.
At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple.
Mine was an IBM house, from the xt, on.
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I remember going to a university as a high schooler in the 80's and being amazed to see the GUI of an Apple computer, and the mouse pointer would change to an hour glass while waiting for something, When the hour glass filled, it would rotate and fill again. That animation blew me away, I was still using DOS at home.
It's fascinating just how balkanised computing was at that point. Growing up in Norway I never saw a non-Mac Apple computer in person. Commodore was dominant, with Atari, Spectrum, Amstrad as runners up. Some schools had the homegrown Tiki (early versions were Z-80, then with an 8088 CPU board), but that was itself a response to a survey finding 75 different models of computers in Norwegian schools as of 1982 leading to a government standard (that was largely outdated before it was published; demanding CP/M compatibility)