Originally posted by droidhacker
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What I didn't realize at the time though was this was exactly what the provincial governments did NOT want... their reason for funding computers in education was to stop teachers from buying Apple II's, pirating software, and following a curriculum that the Ministry of Education did not control. Prior to the arrival of inexpensive computers they had been able to control the curriculum by subsidizing only "preferred" textbooks but not the rest, but the ability to copy software (albeit illegally) put that at risk.
So... the hypermedia system was stripped off just before launch, and the systems shipped with little more than a text editor and the initial Watcom language ports... which kinda sucked. Sounds like you managed to learn quite a bit on them anyways, although probably not what MOE had in mind for you either
And just for completeness, this was not AMD, clear ? I did use a lot of AMD bit-slice processor parts in other projects we were working on (higher end graphics engines, automated PCB layout systems etc..) but the ICON systems were just an Intel 80186, the token-ring network chip, some DRAM and a bunch of TTL (replaced by a gate array in the ICON2).
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