I was the one who made the monitor rom changes from Apple ][+ to Apple //e.

As for Mac clones, remember that Apple makes much of its money from the hardware, not the OS. Steve Jobs recognized this, which was a major reason for killing the clones.

The Apple II’s were, practically speaking, as open as the IBM PC was. There were legal clones (most notably the Laser 128′s) and illegal clones. Apple made available a great deal of technical documentation on the machines–I have, for instance, a copy of the technical reference guide for the //e that contains (among other things) a schematic of the circuitry excepting the power supply, a description of what each of the ASICs does, timing diagrams, and notes on the peripheral slot interfaces. I also have a supplement that contains commented source code for the monitor ROM.

It took some time for the PC clones to become significantly less expensive than the contemporary Apple II’s. Many peripherals were equally usable on both systems, such as printers and external modems, and thus were not cheaper for PC’s. (Macs, on the other hand, were somewhat more costly than the PC clones from the get-go.)

Finally, why does it matter if the hardware of a computer used in education (especially elementary and high school education) is the same as that used by businesses? I’d think the most important computer skill to learn would be typing, and that can be taught with most anything with a keyboard–including, as in my case, purely mechanical contraptions that require no electricity at all.

(and thanks to all the rest of you geeks for all the rest that I recall but barely remember).

Later on we got a C64 at home. No dedicated monitor of course, just an RF switch on the back of the living room TV – IIRC even ads showing computers in home settings had exactly that.

Charlie – Discs full of software! Cool – all I got was the cheap type-in programs that took endless debugging to run right

When the IBM-PC came out, it wasn’t really “open” either. It used a unique bus design, the OS had all sorts of restrictions as to what hardware you could talk to, and it was very expensive to buy – even the 64k cassette version (if it really existed.) The unholy alliance of IBM and Microsoft caused all sorts of problems for early clone makers (anyone remember using “Flight Simulator” as a clone compatibility test?)

Apple made a lot of mistakes in the adolescence of the company. Sometimes I’m amazed it survived. But don’t slag it for lack of ‘openness’ or for decisions made by school boards and governments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone

As can be seen, though, from that article and the references it cites, Apple’s platform in various incarnations has had ups and downs with regards to cloning. Even so, we can likely safely say that today, you won’t be cloning or running unauthorized software on today’s Mac. That doesn’t sound very “open” to me.

/personally, I only consider something truely open if it is GPL’d with source code and schematics available; a Linux-based commodity hardware PC is a compromise of necessity, unfortunately.

You do realize that every Mac sold today can run OSX, MS Windows, and many flavors of Linux? Once installed, these can be run independently by choice upon startup, or simultaneously through emulators (including a decent open-source version from Sun). The modern Mac hardware is far more open than anything else out there.

- Though the program at the right doesn’t produce the result on that boy’s screen, COLOR=6 does display that blue color.

- Those are 9″ Sony black-and-white CCTV monitors anyway; affordable color monitors were a couple years off.

- I worked at 10260 Bandley (aka “Bandley 1″) in 1979-80, my first in a long series of Apple buildings. I recall the day Apple turned down Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program.

Cubicles! Cubicles in a classroom! ARGGHHH!!!

Talk about a setup for the students possible future office life – ugh!

Apple IIe computers (and later, Macs) were thus left to basically rot in schools for years after most everyone else (business and families) had either switched or started to switch to cheaper PCs and all of their interchangeable and cheaper equipment. I remember being in high school where the labs still had old Apple IIe computers in the early 1990s; it probably wasn’t until later in the decade that they were literally forced to switch, if they wanted internet access; plus, the prices had come down so low that it didn’t make sense to keep all that old technology around any longer.

Some of this blowback was also the cause behind Apple almost failing as a company.

I tend to wonder, though, whether those choices (had those making them could have seen the future of the clones) made differently, would have made for a better or worse education for the students? Had the schools instead waited 5-7 years longer, they could’ve had a classroom of PC compatibles, that could’ve been continually upgraded, and the software used wouldn’t have necessarily had to fall by the wayside (in many cases) because of those upgrades…? Difficult to say, ultimately.

But it does point out that when you choose technology, it might be best to choose the technology which uses fairly open standards (OK – it took Compaq to open things up; but IBM almost gave away the blueprint of how to do it), and has wide support from a variety of vendors and 3rd parties (especially 3rd parties selling cloned devices). Until I see a cloned iPad, or OSX running on a white-box PC with Apple’s blessing (yeah, right – on both!), we might be doing our schools and students a disservice pushing to saddle them with Apple equipment and software (yes, I know the Mac OS is based on BSD, but that “openness” only goes so deep – really, OSX is not BSD, or NextStep, or anything open – at all anymore) a second time (ultimately all for the sake of “look how cool it looks”).

The proper thing to do would be to advocate for bog-standard PCs running Linux and other GNU/Open Source software, IMHO. But you’ll never see that happen, because that makes sense. At best, you’ll see (well, you already see) PCs running more Microsoft products; products that crash, products that become virus-ridden just by looking at them, products that attract malware in droves, products that need upgrading for more dollars every year, products that don’t adhere to open standards.

Then again – that does sound familiar in a way…