I think the oldest I really used myself was the Apple II computers we’d use in computer class in elementary school, although I think they might’ve been a bit outdated since the Macintosh had already been out for five years when I started kindergarten. Our family’s first computer was a 286 compatible built by a guy at my dad’s job. It came with some version of DOS and Windows 3.1. I strongly suspect all of the software he delivered on it was warez.
I only started seeing Macs in the country I was living in at that time in the mid 2000s. And even then it was only very well off families (and this was by far the richest city in the country).
The Apple II was popular in schools and it seems Apple thought that getting into the education market would lead to home sales, but the lower cost of PC hardware and Microsoft’s success at business sales seemed to win out. We started using Macs when I got to fifth grade and sixth grade, but by eighth grade I was in a different school and we used Windows anytime we used a computer. It wasn’t until I went to university that I saw and used Macs again, since I was studying broadcast communication. The university was huge and had all sorts of options. Classrooms with computers would get whatever worked best for their usage but the open computer labs would have a mix of Windows, Macs, Red Hat Linux, and Sun Solaris. Everything ran Novell NetWare so it didn’t really matter what computer we used unless we needed software specific to an operating system, like Final Cut Pro.
I think the oldest I really used myself was the Apple II computers we’d use in computer class in elementary school, although I think they might’ve been a bit outdated since the Macintosh had already been out for five years when I started kindergarten. Our family’s first computer was a 286 compatible built by a guy at my dad’s job. It came with some version of DOS and Windows 3.1. I strongly suspect all of the software he delivered on it was warez.
I only started seeing Macs in the country I was living in at that time in the mid 2000s. And even then it was only very well off families (and this was by far the richest city in the country).
The Apple II was popular in schools and it seems Apple thought that getting into the education market would lead to home sales, but the lower cost of PC hardware and Microsoft’s success at business sales seemed to win out. We started using Macs when I got to fifth grade and sixth grade, but by eighth grade I was in a different school and we used Windows anytime we used a computer. It wasn’t until I went to university that I saw and used Macs again, since I was studying broadcast communication. The university was huge and had all sorts of options. Classrooms with computers would get whatever worked best for their usage but the open computer labs would have a mix of Windows, Macs, Red Hat Linux, and Sun Solaris. Everything ran Novell NetWare so it didn’t really matter what computer we used unless we needed software specific to an operating system, like Final Cut Pro.