Nobody knew how it worked, and all you could do with them was look up books in the library or run some terrible typing tutor program.
Everyone's personal computer, which was extremely rare to have, would be some random thing. C64 for one person, Sinclair for another. At first I borrowed a neighbour's TI 99/4A. Later a loaner C64 which was better because you could at least copy games for it.
> Here the school districts were partitioned along different brands of computer.
And...what does that have to do with it? My elementary school had a handful of TI-99/4As. Oh, and a single PET. Others, sure, had different systems.
> Everyone's personal computer, which was extremely rare to have, would be some random thing. C64 for one person, Sinclair for another.
Yes, same here, except the “extremely rare to have”; most, but not all, of the people I knew from middle class backgrounds had at least one computer in the home. (My answer about similar computers was by class, not make and model; I didn't personally know anyone else with a Timex-Sinclair, though after I got a PC some other people I knew that did, too, but mostly several years later; people I knew had C64, TI-99/4 or /4A, Atari, Apple, TRS-80, and possibly some others.)
The reason that was a problem was someone who worked hard to figure out how the TI machine worked was dead in the water when it came to the C64. Apple ][ people couldn't help you with anything other than the most basic of questions, beyond that it was all arcane hacks to get anything to happen.
When the C64 was a thing I'd estimate 50% of the students I knew had an NES or other console (Colecovision!) and maybe 20% had some kind of computer, most of which were different, incompatible models.
Nobody knew anything about anything, and getting advice from professionals was never going to happen.
Here the school districts were partitioned along different brands of computer. One would have Amiga, one Macintosh, the others a mix of C64/PET.
Mine had, for reasons nobody could ever explain, settled on the Unisys ICON system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_ICON
Nobody knew how it worked, and all you could do with them was look up books in the library or run some terrible typing tutor program.
Everyone's personal computer, which was extremely rare to have, would be some random thing. C64 for one person, Sinclair for another. At first I borrowed a neighbour's TI 99/4A. Later a loaner C64 which was better because you could at least copy games for it.