Jobs Brought Computers to the Classroom

Steve Jobs died last week.  Articles about this man's life and death have been written by the score across all forms of media.  Steve Jobs was a man who influenced history.  He designed and marketed one of the first successful personal computers.

Part of Apple's early marketing effort includes introducing the personal computer to the classroom.

Since the sixties, public and private schools have been utilizing computers.  However, for a long time, this usage was confined to universities.  What's more, they were not computers as we know them, but rather mainframes.  A mainframe at that time was a very large and powerful (for its time) computer that mostly did very basic computations with paper punch input still common even in the mid- to late-sixties.  Even when computers moved into K-12 level schools, they were rarely found in the actual classrooms.

When Apple began producing computers for individual use, they also had to create a market.  Jobs and Apple began donating computers to schools for instructional use by teachers in the mid seventies.  At that point, mainframe usage began to lose dominance in education.  Although there were stumbling blocks, computer usage is common in almost every classroom across America today.  Today, Microsoft machines have become predominate in most of the country's school districts due to their comparative affordability.   That being said, the market and even idea of computers in elementary and high school classrooms was not considered realistic until Jobs created the market.  No one thought that children were capable of using computers until then.

In large part, we have Jobs to thank not just for Apple computers, but also for the prevalence of computers in learning.