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From: UNESTJ@UNCVX1.BITNET (Tamara)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Educomputing 2000
Message-ID: <8912301746.AA02488@apple.com>
Date: 30 Dec 89 16:44:00 GMT
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Organization: The Internet
Lines: 37


                                                    Time : 30-DEC-1989 12:35

>
> In article <7143@shlump.nac.dec.com>, erickson@mfgmem.dec.com writes:
> >
> >         This is  a  call  for SPECULATION regarding the grade school/high
> >         school educational computing environment of the year 2000.
>
> As impossible as it seems to predict this far ahead in the computer world I
> would like to make one observation. I think that the greatest threat to Apple'
   s
> hold on the K-12 market will come as a result of IBM's release of OS/2 and the
   ir
> new bus architecture.
 [rest of argument deleted]
> Bob Church
> att!oucsace!bchurch
 Bob perhaps this is an oversimplification of your argument but I will state it
 anyway. You seem to argue that most of the decisions about education are based
 on hardware, whereas I believe it is the educational software which sells the
 machine to educational institutions. How much educational software has been
 written for OS2? Why would K-12 need 386s or 486s? What about the investment
 schools have already made in software and training in that software?

 Schools are conservative institutions. Change comes slowly. IBM is going to
 have to do more than just offer a cheaper better machine. I believe they will
 need a good argument for telling schools (especially their libraries) to trash
 all the software they've invested in because there's better software out there
 and that multitasking or speed or any of the other sexy things OS2 proports to
 do are really going to be useful in this particular environment.

 Just my humble opinion

--------
"Keep On Rocking in a Free World"
     Neil Young                                 UNESTJ@uncvx1.bitnet<Tamara>