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I don’t know what its like in the US, but for the most part here in Australia, if you do a degree in any computer-related subjects, then the platform is PC based—unless and until you get out into the high end stuff. One place where I worked, we used a CRAY .. and that was a serious processor!

But, even most of the schools use PC stuff .. maybe because Bill Gates offers special licensing ..

But .. if everyone is trained on Windows PC’s then, its natural that the majority will stick with what they know

Dare I say it .. its almost as though Apple has a ‘cult’ following .. not that there’s anything wrong with that .. supported largely by the ‘aesthetic’ community of advertising and fashion (including web design) .. and a few authors ..

BTW .. who remembers the TRS “Trash” 80 or the Comodore 64?

I remember the TRS 80.  My first foray into programming was at 5/6 years old with my father, keying in BASIC programs from a magazine into our TI-99/4a.

I had one of the first TRS-80’s of anyone I went to school with (middle school era).  By the time I was in high school they had developed programming classes on the TRS-80 Model 3.  I was still one of maybe 3 in the class who could do the work at home, then get in trouble in class for goofing off…;)

I can still remember the teacher telling us not to take BASIC too seriously, as it wasn’t a “real language”.  Used to laugh at that during the years I did VB programming.

I can still remember the teacher telling us not to take BASIC too seriously, as it wasn’t a “real language”.  Used to laugh at that during the years I did VB programming.

After graduating high school, I was the store manager for a Gamestop for a few years (then called Babbage’s), and their point of sale software was all written in BASIC.  I hear from current employees that it was only updated after the merger between Gamestop and EB, heh.

I have a vague memory of one assignment which was to build and program 6502 board (in BASIC) .. I think the clock speed was 1MHz ..

now .. MOS6502 was best known for its use in the early Apple computers

then IBM introduced the PC, which was based on a 4.77MHz 8088 processor running MS-DOS 1.0

aaahhh .. those were the days when you could trouble-shoot a computer with a multimeter .. usually an old VOM!

I remember the TRS 80.  My first foray into programming was at 5/6 years old with my father, keying in BASIC programs from a magazine into our TI-99/4a.

Showing my age, I guess, but your mention of the TRS 80 brought back some fond memories. I was but a cub reporter when those things came out. They were great for the times. We could take them on assignments and, cumbersome as it was by our standards now, write and transfer our stories back to the paper’s system for editing and publication. Sure beat dictating the whole thing over a phone.